Loudspeakers Speakon jack - is it amped or not

I'm helping a school with their auditorium sound where it looks like they've had at least 3 layers of sound equipment installs overlapping each other. XLR jacks in the wall have been taped over because, I was told, their wires had been commandeered for some hanging choir mics; there are Bose speakers in the wings that, I was told, worked at one time, but not anymore; channel labels on the mixer don't correspond to the labels on XLR jacks on the stage, tho they supposedly do control whatever gets plugged into them - ya know, stuff like that.

My question - there are 4 Speakon jacks on stage, 2 SL and 2 SR. How do I know if those jacks carry any signal, and if so, is it straight out of the mixer (where I'd need an active, powered speaker) or is it coming from a power amp (and I'd need a passive speaker)? I was told that these were once connectors for backstage monitor speakers, "but I don't know if they work anymore or where the speakers are..."

Fun and games. Any help greatly appreciated - I know I'll learn tons. And thank you in advance.
 
Can you attempt route some signal to those outputs and then put a meter on it? If it's one or two volts (I believe) it's line level. Substantially above that, it's from an amplifier. Do you have a passive speaker that you could plug into the Speakon jack? If you hear something, it's a powered signal. If you don't it's line level. Sound isn't my forte, but somebody should be along soon who can confirm or deny all this. Oh, and all this assumes that you are able to confirm that you are actually sending signal to that jack...
 
Can you attempt route some signal to those outputs and then put a meter on it? If it's one or two volts (I believe) it's line level. Substantially above that, it's from an amplifier. Do you have a passive speaker that you could plug into the Speakon jack? If you hear something, it's a powered signal. If you don't it's line level. Sound isn't my forte, but somebody should be along soon who can confirm or deny all this. Oh, and all this assumes that you are able to confirm that you are actually sending signal to that jack...
Thanks - that seems like a safe way to start tracking things down.
 
speakon, which is a brand name for NL2, NL4, or NL8 connectors, are designed to be used for amplifier outputs. you should assume that these speakon connectors are meant to be used with passive speakers and nothing else.

of course it's possible someone did something wrong, but fortunately you cannot hurt a passive speaker with line level input, so plugging in a passive speaker is the best was to test it.
 
I would say step one would be find the amp rack and confirm an amp is getting signal when you send stuff down an aux. If not that will be the first issue to challange. The secound step would be confirming where the amps outputs are sent and if there is a patch panel or not.
 
For my mind I like to know where all the cables go in any venue that I spend time in especially my regular venues. So I would get a friend and check every cable run to see where it goes. Very tedious work but the rewards are big. When someone says can I get this item working in your space you will have a fair idea how to go about it. Working a space for the first time for me is an interesting time and I poke around a little to get the lay of the (cable) land.
Get a signal generator tool like a network tester and send signals down each cable and find it at the other end. I know you are helping out in a school but do what you can to work it out. Those Bose speakers might just need a connection or even power to them. And I agree with statements above that speakon "should" be sent from the amps.
Have a great day.
Regards
Geoff
 
i mean... whether bose loudspeakers ever truly work is a matter of some debate...
Bose: Bring Other Sound Equipment

"Bose, better sound through litigation." (they sued Consumer Reports over a negative review back in the late 1960s).
 
that has not been my experience for audience sizes larger than about 50.

then again, i don’t think anything made by JBL sounds particularly good, either. i am an unapologetic speaker snob.
 
that has not been my experience for audience sizes larger than about 50.

then again, i don’t think anything made by JBL sounds particularly good, either. i am an unapologetic speaker snob.
It's all about what people expect to hear and what they're used to hearing.

Bose's consumer-grade and weekend-warrior-grade shtick was presenting a different EQ and spatial profile than recording artists intended. It was disloyal to the the artists but to the average listener, it sounded "different" which perked peoples' ears up and became associated with "better".

JBL's not too dissimilar but it really depends on the product lineup. First and foremost though, they are an automotive sound system supplier and everything else they do is secondary to that. Also not unlike Bose.

I always get funny looks from contractors when I'm tuning a system and go through the 70V stuff and throw EQ on JBL's Control series speakers. They just sound godawful out of the box but in the applications they're commonly used in, people don't know better or care. I've walked into spaces with JBL VRX cabinets that were blown up and distorted -- probably had been for years -- and nobody, not even the professional sound designers for those venues had ever stopped to think if those cabinets are supposed to be that muffled and quiet. Which is why Friday when I'm going to check out a basketball arena that's all VRX, I'm going to spend all of 30 seconds listening to the system and just start peeling cables off the backs of the amps and running impedance sweeps. Listening tests are subjective and deceptive but impedance sweeps tell the empirical truth when the venue has probably had blown up drivers in their arrays for the last 5-6 years and everyone just got used to that being the expectation of how that space should sound and have lost the ability to open their ears in an unbiased way.

Colleague of mine used to joke that if you put line array demos up of Pioneer (yes, that Pioneer), Mackie, and d&b, most average people off-the-street would gravitate towards Pioneer and Mackie on the absolute bottom-end of the quality spectrum. They're listening to speakers like it's their home stereo system and want to crank that bass even if it sounds like trash and has no definition. The clarity and honesty you get from a d&b/Meyer/L-Acoustics system is not what the average person is looking for. That sounds flat and unexciting in the context of a side-by-side listening test. It provides an excellent and transparent experience when it's working working flawlessly, but when it's working flawlessly people simply put it out-of-sight/out-of-mind. This is the audio curse -- there is an inverse relationship between sound quality and listener awareness. The better it sounds, the less anyone notices the sound quality at all because they're too busy being immersed in a transparent experience.

/end rant
//apologies for the novel, I've been awake for 36 hours less a couple 15-min naps working on getting a design package out for a project. I need a couple good distractions from work like this before I can shut my brain off and stumble back in the direction of my bed
 
i work mainly in medium to large scale theater. what the average person is looking for is of no interest to me. an honest sound system is the only way to reproduce whatever sound i wish to reproduce.

a speaker shoudn't sound exciting. the sound that comes OUT of a speaker should sound exciting, which means i should make an exciting sound. once i do, i want the speaker to reproduce it, not try to impose an opinion all over it.
 
I've heard a Bose system in an 800 seat venue that sounded clean, accurate and faithful, because it had been set up and eq'd for the venue. I've also heard some god awful systems from extremely well respected manufacturers, because they've been slung up by the touring crew and not set up prooperly, so the accuracy you expect is lost and they sound horribly coloured, to the extent that you'd believe they were incapable of building a decent system.
 
For my mind I like to know where all the cables go in any venue that I spend time in especially my regular venues. So I would get a friend and check every cable run to see where it goes. Very tedious work but the rewards are big. When someone says can I get this item working in your space you will have a fair idea how to go about it. Working a space for the first time for me is an interesting time and I poke around a little to get the lay of the (cable) land.
Get a signal generator tool like a network tester and send signals down each cable and find it at the other end. I know you are helping out in a school but do what you can to work it out. Those Bose speakers might just need a connection or even power to them. And I agree with statements above that speakon "should" be sent from the amps.
Have a great day.
Regards
Geoff

For what it's worth I've found this SoundTools XLR Sniffer/Sender to be a useful tool in tracing down XLR cabling in any venue where I can't or don't want to physically run down every cable to see where it goes. Though, if I remember correctly the light on the sniffer will light up in the presence of phantom power so I generally turn certain pieces of equipment off in the signal chain, anything that would generate phantom.

http://soundtools.com/cable-testers-page-ssxlr.html

Sound Tools also makes a sniffer/sender for NL4 Speakon, I don't own it yet ;) but I believe NL2 and NL4 are compatible so maybe it will work to test NL2. Handy stuff.

https://soundtools.com/cable-testers-page-ssnl4.html

And a good ol' Whirlwind Q Box or even better a pair of them - always super helpful
 
NL2 is just NL4 with half as many wires. the tester will show one good pair and one bad pair on a working NL2, so that’s no problem.
 
Anybody got a Cat5 to NL4/8 adapter? :)
I used to do that. Got an RJ45 wire mapper and made various adapters for XLR, NL4, NL8, patchbay connectors, so forth.

Gave it up after awhile because it was a lot to manage and the bag of adapters was larger than I liked considering all the other equipment I already had to take with me on job sites. Tomorrow's expedition I'm going on is already up to 3 large pelican cases and a 6-space rack. If my wire mapper adapters got mixed up with someone else's on my team, their adapters may have different pinouts on the category cable. Few people also blew a number of them up when people would inadvertently plug them into data jacks with POE -- and with many cables hardwired to the back of amps, DSP's, and other equipment, the rack-end of the equipment we generally just had to visually inspect. There was also the problem that RJ45 wire mappers are like no-named Chinese lighting fixtures. There's like one company that makes them for 35-cents and then fifty companies stamp their names on them and sell them for $35 --- and sometimes they are just wildly unreliable.

For what OP is asking for though, a wire mapper is probably less useful than a wire tracer/toner or "Fox & Hound" to follow the cables and listen to the receiver beep even if the cables are buried in the walls. But that's only useful if you actually know roughly which direction the cables are going. Best solution is likely to just pop ceiling tiles and follow the conduits assuming they aren't buried in the slab. They lead somewhere, and AV cabling is almost never mixed with other trades' conduits so it shouldn't be too hard to delineate AV pathways from power, data, security, etc. Most likely they'll be found in an obscure closet or mechanical/electrical room -- or they aren't there anymore at all and the cabling is abandoned.
 
I used to do that. Got an RJ45 wire mapper and made various adapters for XLR, NL4, NL8, patchbay connectors, so forth.

Gave it up after awhile because it was a lot to manage and the bag of adapters was larger than I liked considering all the other equipment I already had to take with me on job sites. Tomorrow's expedition I'm going on is already up to 3 large pelican cases and a 6-space rack. If my wire mapper adapters got mixed up with someone else's on my team, their adapters may have different pinouts on the category cable. Few people also blew a number of them up when people would inadvertently plug them into data jacks with POE -- and with many cables hardwired to the back of amps, DSP's, and other equipment, the rack-end of the equipment we generally just had to visually inspect. There was also the problem that RJ45 wire mappers are like no-named Chinese lighting fixtures. There's like one company that makes them for 35-cents and then fifty companies stamp their names on them and sell them for $35 --- and sometimes they are just wildly unreliable.

For what OP is asking for though, a wire mapper is probably less useful than a wire tracer/toner or "Fox & Hound" to follow the cables and listen to the receiver beep even if the cables are buried in the walls. But that's only useful if you actually know roughly which direction the cables are going. Best solution is likely to just pop ceiling tiles and follow the conduits assuming they aren't buried in the slab. They lead somewhere, and AV cabling is almost never mixed with other trades' conduits so it shouldn't be too hard to delineate AV pathways from power, data, security, etc. Most likely they'll be found in an obscure closet or mechanical/electrical room -- or they aren't there anymore at all and the cabling is abandoned.
I was not actually thinking about the wire mapping aspect of the thing, more tone tracing and—now that you mention it—my TDR which is built into my pockethernet.

But, as usual, your reply has given me many other things to think about. Thanks.
 
that has not been my experience for audience sizes larger than about 50.

then again, i don’t think anything made by JBL sounds particularly good, either. i am an unapologetic speaker snob.
Really?

No consideration for the configurer or operator of the system?

Just look first at name brand and assume it's going to suck?

How come twice on my last tour I had to reject the house systems with "Meyer" or "Fulcrum" on the badges, go out to the bus in subzero temps and personally dig out my "emergency PA" from the luggage bins and use that for that evening's show.
-My "emergency" rig was 4 Bose 802's with 2 (optional) self-powered RCF 15" subs.
Why Bose you might ask?
Because I looked at the available truck/bus space and found that it was the most effective to fit. The speakers didn't require additional road-casing or covers and could easily be carried by anyone in the crew and cast. And also it sounded no better or worse than any other of the self-powered options I had available and ran easily off the powersoft monitor amps spare channels with a DSP preset I had made to match a dedicated Bose processor.

I also doubt anything was seriously wrong with the Meyer or Fulcrum rigs other than it seemed someone had messed up their DSP or patching and nobody in the facility had the knowledge or wherewithal to correct it in the time we have available.

When confronted with a system and before automatically rejecting Bose because of the name, just first check to be sure it's patched correctly and running the proper processor. "No Highs, No Lows, Must-be-Bose" is the standard phrase we've all heard or used but that just means you're not running processing. Or in the case of 802's the foam surrounds are all rotted -which is almost a guarantee if you have older ones from before they went to cloth surrounds.

(With their processing I often find that there's too much "lows" and a bit too much "highs")

I also don't recommend going out of your way to source and use Bose M.I. or "Pro-sumer" products for serious productions -there are more cost effective products available that work just as well or better. (Although the current Showmatch DeltaQ arrays and ArenaMatch Utility boxes do warrant a second look)

But if you already have them (and aren't blessed with the bottomless budgets that most on this board seem to have) then with proper configuration and maintenance they can still be the least of your worries when dealing with sound reinforcement for a theatrical presentation.
Your largest concern will always be the skill and talent of the person running the sound.
I will never understand a production that puts a new student with no experience on the board with 24 earset wireless, a full pit orchestra and stage monitors that then blames the name badge on the speakers when it doesn't sound good!
 
Really?

No consideration for the configurer or operator of the system?

any sound system will sound better with a skilled operator than without one. i don't think anyone here believes otherwise, or is arguing otherwise. if you read back, i don't think you'll find that i did.

Just look first at name brand and assume it's going to suck?

no, i do not look at the name brand first and assume it's going to suck.

i take my 28 years/500+ shows of experience and i apply some analysis to them. i have never, personally, been pleased with the results of a bose sound system. i'm not assuming anything, i'm referring to my experience.

How come twice on my last tour I had to reject the house systems with "Meyer" or "Fulcrum" on the badges, go out to the bus in subzero temps and personally dig out my "emergency PA" from the luggage bins and use that for that evening's show.

probably because there was a problem with some part of the house system. something misconfigured, something broken, something unpatched, etc.

i don't think the subzero temperatures are really relevant, but maybe i'm missing something.

-My "emergency" rig was 4 Bose 802's with 2 (optional) self-powered RCF 15" subs.

Why Bose you might ask?
Because I looked at the available truck/bus space and found that it was the most effective to fit. The speakers didn't require additional road-casing or covers and could easily be carried by anyone in the crew and cast. And also it sounded no better or worse than any other of the self-powered options I had available and ran easily off the powersoft monitor amps spare channels with a DSP preset I had made to match a dedicated Bose processor.

i mean, that all sounds reasonable to me! but also, it sounds like you have a lot of considerations here which are unrelated to sound quality. which is real and true and i'm not objecting at all. but i was talking about sound quality, not overall suitability for packing as an emergency P.A.

my point is, and has always been, than in an apples-to-apples comparison between, say, a bose 802 and a d&b Y10, i think the d&b sounds dramatically better. and i also think that in a non-comparison situation, where the question is "do you like how an 802 sounds when properly configured and operated by someone with skill?" my answer is, "no i do not."

i know about the processor. they definitely sound terrible without the processor. and i think, in my subjective opinion which belongs only to me, that they sound pretty terrible even with the processor.

I also don't recommend going out of your way to source and use Bose M.I. or "Pro-sumer" products for serious productions -there are more cost effective products available that work just as well or better.

so... you agree with me?

But if you already have them (and aren't blessed with the bottomless budgets that most on this board seem to have) then with proper configuration and maintenance they can still be the least of your worries when dealing with sound reinforcement for a theatrical presentation.

i work mostly in environments with no house inventory. i mostly have to rent everything. when i work at a theater with house gear, i assess what i have and what my budget is, and make a judgement call. maybe the theater has 802s for mains, a mackie 1202 for a console, and a 1/4" open reel tape deck for playback. in that case, i'll spend my budget on a QLab mac, thank you very much.

Your largest concern will always be the skill and talent of the person running the sound.

i agree.

I will never understand a production that puts a new student with no experience on the board with 24 earset wireless, a full pit orchestra and stage monitors that then blames the name badge on the speakers when it doesn't sound good!

i don't know anyone who does this. i certainly don't do this.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back