apparently trees will dissipate the sound, shes baking 😀 (another form of witchcraft science)

how loud’s her oven? 😀

Those Turbosound tops only handle 200w each. Is the desk powering those and the Marshall bins? (not heard of those)

If so you should have a crossover of some sort otherwise your tops are going to crap-out before everything else.

Yeah, but if a party happens in the woods and no one’s there to see it, does it actually make any sound at all?

Any rough idea how loud 1200w is going to be in layman’s terms?

If you are actually interested in working it out (as far as actually possible ) then your sub is the biggest problem and the spec for it should probably tell you what spl you are getting for your power in.

But in reality you are likely to have it turned up somewhere around 110db at 1m
2km away from that is 66db down so say 44db at the nearest houses

They will hear that, so anything you can do by way of pointing at trees or avoiding line of sights between the speakers and houses will help

…I think

Routes- thanks mate handy info – the spirit 350w stereo powered desk will be running the 2 marshalls and the 2 turbosounds – I was going to use a system I’m more familiar with but it’s not available on the night sadly.

Will they degrade separately to the marshalls or did you mean next to the other amp and sub?

McHamish- 😀 I like your style

Leffe – Very helpful indeed – going off my chart 44 is around ambient noise levels outside so that most likely means it wont be heard indoors no? but like you say avoiding line of sight as much as possible is a great idea – thanks again for the rough figures

Next thing I need to work out is if the 6kva Generator is ok to deal with that lot 😛

Outside noise overnight of 45 can be considered nuisance level causing sleep disturbance if windows are open.

I just meant if you’re sending a full range signal to both marshall subs and the tops, as you crank it up the tops will struggle with the bass end and start to flap / distort (not gracefully!) before you can reach the potential of the full system.
The bins may have a passive crossover / high pass filter in them, if so make sure you daisy chain the speaker signal through them to the tops which should remove the bottom end from the tops (leaving the bin to do the work).
Also, make sure all your impedances are correct. Those tops are 8 ohm, which means your bins should be 8 ohm each aswell to use them in the manner you describe. (2 x 8 ohms = 4 ohms total per side) Too low an impedance and you’ll likely blow up the amp, but I assume whoever’s lending out the kit will have specced it appropriately.

– going off my chart 44 is around ambient noise levels outside so that most likely means it wont be heard indoors no?

What ebygomm says. During the day it is ok but at night when there is no background noise and all you get is bass then it may be a problem. How about firing up google earth and taking a look at who is where height wise. The local rail company are putting sound proofing on a new section of track near where I live and they seem to work mainly on a line of site basis when working out where to out the sound blocking stuff

Are we talking RMS or PMPO, if its PMPO, you’re gonna need a bigger amp! Think of people as bags of water, 150 bags of water will absorb a lot of sound, so I expect you will need some more power.

I used to use a 2K rig for small outdoors parties, but it was extremely efficient, and others used a 5K rig that sounds just as loud.

If you can raise the tweeters up high, and point them down to where people will be dancing, it will mean the sound wont travel as far, and you are using the ground as a shield/abosrbing the sound.

As above (MTBRoutes), make sure the amp can handle the ohm’age and never under power a speaker, its more likely to blow. He also makes some good points about crossovers and filters. 😉

1200W is pretty small, but a 1200W in car setup wont be 1200W, 600w rms if your lucky.

As a guide……

Our ‘band rig’ was 8 peevee 250’s daisy chained 2×2 in stereo was 2k and that could fill a half empty bar upto an acceptable volume, but not if it was full of people.

Our big rig was 8k (martin audio, 4×18″ subs, 2x mid/high cases). You could still work in the same room, but you had to put tape on the floor to stop people walking within a meter of them.

Sounds like you have a lot of subs and no mid/high, as a guide, they should be arround 4:2:1 ratio, so a 7k rig would be ammped 4k, 2k 1k for bass, mid, trebble.

What travels further depends on a variety of things, bass will travel through things better (think outside a club, or a chavy corsa with the windows up) but trebble is audiable at a greater distance (emergency whistle on lifejacket, not an emergency obo).

Thanks for all the info, reading it all now 🙂