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Post subject: Subwoofer with Passport 500 question
Posted: Mon May 27, 2013 6:00 am
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Sorry if this is a repeat question. Planning on purchasing a 500W 18" sub woofer to compliment my passport 500 PA. Just want to understand how this sub woofer will react/interact with my 500. It is my understanding that the Passport crossover is 120hz and the sub I am planning on purchasing has a non-adjustable 80hz crossover. How will this effect my audio output? What will happen to the 81hz-119hz sent to the sub? Specs on the sub can be found here: http://yorkville.com/loudspeakers/yx/product/yx18sp/

Any additional information is also greatly appreciated.

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Post subject: Re: Subwoofer with Passport 500 question
Posted: Mon May 27, 2013 7:50 am
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While the subwoofer you are planning to pair with the Passport Pro 500 is very impressive, depending on the kind of music you intend to play through the system, it might not be the best choice.

To directly answer your question, the system will essentially get a notch filter, nearly eliminating sound between 80Hz and 120Hz. I say "nearly" because crossover circuits do not perfectly eliminate sound right at the advertised threshold. It's just that having one number to refer to is convenient, especially for matching up equipment like this. The number lets you know that the subwoofer will accurately portray sound below 80Hz and the Passport will accurately portray sound above 120Hz, and nobody's guaranteeing anything about those frequencies in between.

If you use this subwoofer, it's highly unlikely that you'll run from the room shrieking, "Oh my God! It sounds horrible!" Meanwhile, there will be a muted notch of frequencies somewhere between very low and very, very low. If your music heavily features wall-shaking thumps and tinkly high synthesizers, you might love this.

But my experience is that 500 watts of subwoofer is overkill for this sound system. You can do with less. You'd spend less money and have less weight to carry and require less volume in your van to haul this system if you got a smaller subwoofer, and it would probably play those missing frequencies.

I have a 400 watt 15" subwoofer that weighs about 65 pounds, and when playing techno music for contra dances (likely at a lower volume than you might play it), the master volume on the Passport is set higher than the volume on the subwoofer. Of course, everything is a matter of taste, and maybe you want more bass than I do. Maybe I play for very acoustically live halls and you intend to play outdoors. There are many variables that you have not filled in to describe your music and its context.

But it looks like you've picked a subwoofer that has a crossover frequency a little too low, and is probably a little overpowered for this sound system. The one speaker cabinet will be much larger and heavier than the Passport's two speakers and mixer/amp. This makes a statement about your relationship with bass. If it's that important to you, go for it.

Likely, you are not playing acoustic music, looking for accuracy of reproduction of sound. You are probably playing electric/electronic music that doesn't exist in nature, and your sound system IS the beast making the music, and you are shaping that sound with the choices you make in components. Nothing you do is wrong. Everything you do shapes your chosen sound.

You might, then, want to at least listen to it once before you buy it.


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Post subject: Re: Subwoofer with Passport 500 question
Posted: Mon May 27, 2013 11:26 am
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Thank you once again for your detailed response. I had planned on purchasing a yx10sp, which comes in at 200W with a 10" driver. The price point on that particular sub was 360, but my local music store has a sale on, reducing the price of the 18" (as previously mentioned) from 599 to 499, meaning I could step up to a much larger sub for only an additional 140. This is my reasoning behind going larger than what I would need, as you eluded to.

My plan for the Passport and sub is simply for an at home jam room. I don't gig or anything, just enjoy playing music with my friends at the house, although I would be open to a gig should one ever come up. I plan on running a bass, electronic drums, and vocals through the passport, therefore I wanted a sub which could handle the bass and the drums, alleviating the system from bass frequencies to provide clear, powerful vocals through the Passport speakers.

Had this sale not been on I would've most definitely gone with the 10" 200W, and size or weight isn't of much concern as the sub will spend 95% or more of its lifetime in my basement jam room.

Maybe neither of these, the yx10 or yx18 are the right subs for me as both are non-adjustable at 80hz, something I only realize as i write in this forum today. However, maybe they would be fine seeing as how I am only using these for at-home purposes...I dunno? Is there anything I can do to alter the cross over frequency of either the Passport or the sub? Recommendations?

I love playing music, but the tech side of it is enjoyable as well.

Thanks again!

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Bigdawe


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Post subject: Re: Subwoofer with Passport 500 question
Posted: Tue May 28, 2013 12:20 pm
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17" 500 watt subwoofer for jams at home? You must have a really big house, or really deaf friends (or if they aren't deaf yet, they will be soon).

Wow.

Anyway, I looked these up. Apparently, you mean the yx10sp. Without the "sp" on the end, it's not a subwoofer, and it's not powered.

Okay, so I looked up more stuff. The yx10sp looks like it was designed to work with a pair of yx10p speakers. These are 170 watt speakers, so a pair of them would be a little louder than a Fender Passport Pro 300. So, the 10sp may very well be a little underpowered for the Passport Pro 500.

Then again, there's a very big gap between that and the YX17ps. I'm told that for a subwoofer, 17" is just about perfect for the task. 15" can do it almost as well and is a fine compromise in most settings where extreme power is not needed. For a 10" subwoofer, you need "long excursion" speakers because you have to pump a lot of air for those really low notes, and if you don't have a lot of surface area, the drivers need to shove those little speakers in and out a lot farther than normal speakers do.

For the money, those 10" speakers would probably work fine for jam sessions. They'd be heavily taxed if you crank the Passport Pro up toward it's high end and you want the sub to keep up with it.

Here's one less-than-obvious detail about the Sub Out port on the Passport:

It ignores your Master Volume control. In other words, you turn your music up and and down with the Master Volume, but the extreme bass doesn't change with it. It stays the same. You have to turn the subwoofer up and down at the subwoofer.

Go figure.

I'm sure the engineers know why this is a good idea. I don't. But I live with it. (I'm sure it has something to do with the Master Volume and Master EQ being near each other in the circuitry, and they don't want the master EQ changing the signal feeding to the sub out.)

Anyway, my expectation is that the 10" subwoofer would work for a jam session in a normal sized room. There are finer points of sound quality that would be lost, but most people wouldn't notice, especially after a beer or two. The 17" version would never be turned up very loud on its own volume control, unless you want to hurt people and break things made of glass or sitting on shelves or tables. In a normal house setting, it's going to be damned loud.

If you want damned loud, you don't want the 10" subwoofers.

As for the missing notch in the music, hey, if there's a local music store selling these things, take your Passport to the music store, plug in the unit, plug your iPod into the Passport and see what it sounds like with the subwoofer plugged in and with it unplugged.

Be sure to unplug the Sub Out cable from the Passport (with power off) when you test this because the physical plugging in of the cable to that port is what switches in the crossover circuitry.


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Post subject: Re: Subwoofer with Passport 500 question
Posted: Wed May 29, 2013 10:22 am
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I have just realized an error in my previous posts regarding the yx18sp (including the yx10sp); they both have integrated 80hz crossover outputs, but work in the range of 45hz-150hz frequencies. Therefore, the sub would play everything from 120hz-45 hz based on the crossover in the Passport. Only the output line on the sub has a non-adjustable crossover of 80hz. My bad...!

This sub should work just fine...and yes, it is much more than I need and will undoubtedly stay set very low in master volume, however I can't justify spending 360 on a 200W 10" when for an additional $140 I can go all the ways to a 500W 18"...never know, it may come in handy some day. The $599 price tag, or difference of $260 was unjustifiable, but with the $100 knocked off, I believe it couldn't hurt to spend the minimal extra 100 odd dollars and get the much larger woofer...just my opinion.

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Bigdawe


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Post subject: Re: Subwoofer with Passport 500 question
Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2014 2:08 pm
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I use a 500 watt Seismic Audio powered subwoofer (18") with the Passport 500 Pro.
It's a beast. Big and heavy and EXACTLY what I was hoping for. I also use high quality speaker cables to both speakers and the subwoofer.

It can be - and has been argued - that this size of subwoofer is overkill, however, for my purposes, it works very well and represents the only PA system that can authentically produce the sound I want to project.


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