BillFitzmaurice.info

Thank you byacey, for sharing both sides of the coin. Both points are valid.

Yeah... I am more of the hobbyist. I have already spent over £5,000 (easily!) on my 'hobby', so trying to keep costs down is a good thing. In a professional environment, £5K isn't anywhere near as much. I am trying to work towards moving into the pro field, but until I do, I cannot justifying spending large amounts. I look forward to the day when I can buy Powersofts

Hi all

I use the SYNQ amps extensively and have never had any issues thus far after three years of plenty reasonably big outdoor gigs.
Here in South Africa the agent for SYNQ and JB Systems says that the Beglec group are extremely fussy regarding quality control and who in China supplies their components. (For what it's worth).
Something interesting regarding QSC, Crown and Behringer here in South Africa, they all get repaired by the same people here as they get replacement parts such as swop out PC boards, transformers and power supplies from the same supplier in China for all three (excluding the onboard DSP and cosmetic stuff), one of the guys working in the repair section is family of mine, go figure.
If the quality of the JB System amps are as good as the SYNQ's I would not hesitate to use them.

Oh and trust me, at the moment I'm busy with the third week of a four week tour and my back just loves the weight of these 1U babies too..

My two cents worth of real time touring experience.
Going to sleep now, totally knackered.

PulseMan

PulseMan wrote:Hi all

I use the SYNQ amps extensively and have never had any issues thus far after three years of plenty reasonably big outdoor gigs.
Here in South Africa the agent for SYNQ and JB Systems says that the Beglec group are extremely fussy regarding quality control and who in China supplies their components. (For what it's worth).
Something interesting regarding QSC, Crown and Behringer here in South Africa, they all get repaired by the same people here as they get replacement parts such as swop out PC boards, transformers and power supplies from the same supplier in China for all three (excluding the onboard DSP and cosmetic stuff), one of the guys working in the repair section is family of mine, go figure.
If the quality of the JB System amps are as good as the SYNQ's I would not hesitate to use them.

Oh and trust me, at the moment I'm busy with the third week of a four week tour and my back just loves the weight of these 1U babies too..

My two cents worth of real time touring experience.
Going to sleep now, totally knackered.

PulseMan

Good enough for me then, I ordered the JB about 10 minutes ago. Should be here tomorrow in time for rehearsal and a gig this coming weekend.

escapemcp wrote:Yeah... I am more of the hobbyist. I have already spent over £5,000 (easily!) on my 'hobby', so trying to keep costs down is a good thing. In a professional environment, £5K isn't anywhere near as much. I am trying to work towards moving into the pro field, but until I do, I cannot justifying spending large amounts. I look forward to the day when I can buy Powersofts

Tell me about it! Our vocalist, who uses one of my mics, a TC Helicon effects that also belongs to me and doesn't have any kit of his own yet, asked me what he needed to buy...and drew an audible gasp of breath when I told him how much the Audix mic he was holding had cost (and that's a respectable mic but still very much a 'working mans' piece of kit, we all know you can pay lots more). He then asked the rest of the band how much all our stuff had cost...and was dumbstruck when the cost of amps, cabs, Rickenbacker basses, Les Pauls, SGs and Strats was carefully explained. Like you I've spent many thousands on my 'hobby' and I haven't stopped yet...I recently got an X32 Rack mixer and I'm hoping that the addition of another DEQ, a DCX, a further couple of power amps and a pair of T39's to the stuff I already have will give me all the PA I'll need. The good thing is that our band have already started to get "best sound I've ever heard from a pub band" type comments which makes it worthwhile and leads to more work. This will be enough for me, but I'm also hoping that if I add a set of drum mics, I'll be able to use the X32's ability to stream 32 tracks to my laptop and offer other bands some combined PA Hire/Live sound recording and perhaps recoup a small percentage of my outlay...if it happens, it happens and, if it happens, it may force a move towards more esoteric kit....but while it's all coming out of my pocket, cheaper is better as long as it's reasonably serviceable and not total crap.

Cool, let us know how it goes and your take on the new amp.

PulseMan

PulseMan wrote:Cool, let us know how it goes and your take on the new amp.

PulseMan

Well, so far very positive.

Due to a medical condition known as "being a dumbass" I didn't actually order it when I thought I had - there was another click of the mouse that I had overlooked, and I didn't pick up on this for another few hours. So it eventually got ordered for real at 4:30 pm, and arrived on my doorstep just after 8:00 am yesterday morning...so top marks to Terratec for their speedy delivery!

The amp looks like a solid little piece of kit, build quality is on par with the XLS1000 I have and all the connectors seem 'Neutrik' quality. The attenuators have a solid feel with a smooth detented potentiometer and the amp does a nice little soft start routine. Fan is a bit noisy when it kicks in but not noticeable under stage conditions.

I racked and cabled it up and did a bit of fiddling with the X32 to assign each channel to a mix bus, hooked up the W8s and played some recorded stuff just to check everything worked as it should. I didn't want a monstrous amp, but one that was ideally matched to the power required by a single 16 ohm W8. Nonetheless I was a little concerned that, with a rule of thumb calculation that it should kick out about 65 watts into 16 ohms, it might not have enough oomph in the real world. I needn't have worried. Thanks to the W8 efficiency, they were deafening playing recorded music in my living room...so a couple of hours later...off to rehearsal.

We don't rehearse at gig volume but we do rehearse at a fairly robust volume level with the same gear that we play on gigs, except for the PA where we use just the W8 monitors. So these two little monitors, driven with approx. 65 watts, up against a full drum kit, a Hughes and Kettner 100 watt half stack, a Marshall 50 watt half stack, a 700 watt bass rig and...the results were STUNNING! Vocals came over loud and clear, in fact with so much punch and clarity that we started to notice other problems with the mix - such as using too much reverb or other vocal effect on some FX patches...hadn't noticed that before when the sound was more blurry. Lots of headroom too!

This isn't just down to a power amp of course, it's a combination of the whole signal chain...most of which is new enough that I'm still on a learning curve with each individual component and obviously trying to make it work as a whole, but this amp and the ability to run a separate mix on each of the W8s seems to be a key piece that makes it all work really well.