as a venue sound engineer, id advise to let the venue deal with the speakers. what is too big (whether physically or way more than necessary loudness potential) for one venue might be too small for another.

not to mention transportation. sure, bands transport a lot of stuff, but do you really need to?

if you *have* to have something, get something decent and active (built in amplifier), but bear in mind that nothing you can likely afford to will give you proper bass if it gives you mids and highs. You will need a tripod stand, unless you like listening to the highs with your feet instead of your ears. Prices range from a few hundred for a plastic looking and sounding speaker, to thousands for something that sounds and feels like a proper audio tool.

1. sounds a bit like bridging both outputs of hte amp into one channel. Too low an impedance coming from the speaker and the amp will get very hot!

i am just beginning with pd, so cannot offer much about tricks, but have done sound system engineering for years and years. fir filters are nto typically used for subs because of latency times. 24 dB/octave linkwitz-reiley filters are the most commonly used and probably the best starting point.

how well do the tops integrate at the crossover frequency?

@je305 said:

I've been running a two speaker setup for a while, but fancied a bit more punch, so I bought a passive subwoofer. My amp doesn't have a special subwoofer output so it's a bit tricky to separate it, and I can only pass signals between my PC and the amp using a 3.5mm (stereo headphone type jack) to phono cable.

What Pd is doing for me is inverting everything <100Hz on one side so that the bass signal is out of phase between left and right. Then I can get my bass separation to the sub in one of two ways:

1. wire the sub between the positive terminals of L + R speakers (L+ to Sub+, R+ to Sub-). Only out of phase signals will cause a potential difference, so the bass signal will pass through the subwoofer because I made it out of phase.

2. Read up on how Dolby Surround works - basically the rear channel is encoded in a very similar way to how I've encoded the bass. By plugging my subwoofer into the rear output of my amp (which has only stereo inputs but dolby pro-logic and surround outputs) I get the bass signal through the sub.

Both of these worked in practise, but number 1 was more successful - it sounded brilliant, the sub giving it some punch and all the higher frequencies through the smaller left and right speakers. I'm going to be fiddling with setting for a while yet to optimise it, but really happy at the moment.

One thing I need to do is learn how to use Jack, because I currently have to use a wire from out->in on one of the soundcards to make it an input in Pd. That should cut a bit of noise and latency out, although I can't hear any noise and the latency is 50ms, but it might help.

*edit: I have no idea if this idea has been incorporated into commercial sound systems or not - does anyone know? After reading how Dolby worked it seemed the obvious solution.