Well I agree with the earlier comment of placing all your amps back
stage. The reason being is that the closer your amps are to the speakers, the less
power is going to be wasted with long
speaker runs. The longer the
speaker cable, the more resistance the amp will see, which means that more of the
power form the amp goes into heating up the cable rather than powering the speakers.
Placing them in some sort of a cage will help keep them secure and ventilated and an external
power switch will be sufficient for powering them up. However, if you do have volume controls on the front of your amps, you may wish to make these accessible through the cage so that they cam be powered up and down more safely (especially in older amps that may not have
speaker protectors built in).
A
comp/
limiter set correctly will prevent them from blowing your
system if it is set up correctly.
There are several options for
speaker routing/switching and most have been covered here. The
power sequencer will turn things on in sequence for you and you would then need to have (
build) a
relay switch for your speakers so that when this
system is powered up, the small speakers are switched on. Although, if you were to use a dedicated amp for the small
system, you would not require this.
One other option is to have a key
switch installed into your
system so that when the
switch is off (key out) only the small
system is activated. With the
switch on (key must remain in) the main
system is active.
Guess your main problem here is to decide how you want to set up the
system – i.e., do you want an amp for each or a single amp to
switch between speakers. At the end of the day, it is not a difficult task to set up a tamper proof, stand alone
system. I have a small rack that I
send out on hires that has a lockable door on the front (it is actually an old computer
network rack) and I have a master volume control wired into the back but the
compressor/
limiter is set so that at full volume (on the master) the
system will not clip or distort.