Titan 48 (solo)

[gdougherty]

The church I attend used to be fully portable, meeting weekly in a theater so we'd gone out and auditioned mains in the under $700ea range and settled on the Peavey SP2x as the best sound for the money that we could audition locally. We've since begun renting from a 7th day adventist group who meets on saturdays, we get the building on Sundays and the portable rig has become my baby to run around with and support local groups that need outdoor or portable sound. I've been slowly dropping my own money on top quality mics and outboard gear brining it all up to something that can support large bands for smaller sized groups of people. I've always known we were seriously limited by our lack of subs, but the $2000 I'd been looking at to get a pair of subs, a sub amp and a Driverack PA has always been way outside the budget. Fortunately, the SP2x's have decent extension and still sound good (not shrill or brittle like some tops we'd auditioned) when pushed hard to cover larger groups. I'd resigned myself to running without subs until I discovered the Lab sub design at prosoundweb and then Bill's designs from postings over there. Suddenly, it all seemed mildly affordable since I could build two for the price of one and run off a much smaller amp than I'd been previously needing.
So here I am, one 29" panel width Titan down and starting on the second today. Yesterday I added additional weatherstripping on the access cover and driver mount to ensure everything was fit, closed it up, corner loaded it, opened the garage door and rattled everything in the garage, and the house, maybe even over at the neighbors'. My father's comments after standing next to the sub was that he'd never had bass hurt before. I was running it bridged mono off a QSC PLX1202 I generally use for monitors and using a new Driverack 260 for crossover of output off the laptop and M-Audio FastTrack Pro I use for portable playback. I'm not sure how much power I was pushing or how much headroom it had left, but I was satisfied I'd gotten it right.
On to the real test. I threw all the gear in a friend's truck and hauled it over to our rented facility which has a trio of passive Mackie 15 and a horn speakers hanging from the ceiling as the mains and no subs. The room seats about 250, is nice accoustically with no parallel walls, minor absorption behind the stage and no real problems that I've identified. The sub went up on stage behind an organ and several plastic trees, the amp went next to it and I ran 100' of XLR from the Driverack 260 feeding from a parallel off the input side of the main EQ at the board. Brought the low cut on the main EQ up to 80Hz, set the Driverack's lowpass at 80Hz, reverse EQ'd Bill's SPL plot for a 3015LF loaded Titan and played with music and various output levels on the sub until about 9PM grinning all the while.
This morning our musicians were a percussionist playing djembe, conga, a cajon and various other drums along with a guitarist doing vocals. I've always loved the sound of our percusionist's djembe, we mic it from the top and the bottom with an e904 on top and an Audix D4 mounted on a clip several inches up into the bottom. This normally gets us pretty good boom and I run the two mics about even. Today I had to back way off the bottom mic because the flourescent ballasts were rattling otherwise. The djembe player would smile wide now and then as he did center slaps and felt the sub put out what we'd both been really looking for. I discovered low end information in instrument mics that I'd never heard before. The smallish cajon with snare that I'd not considered as having much low end now sounded almost as full as the djembe. I play a little bass now and then, plugged in after service cranked it up and nearly rattled pictures off the walls with the bottom E on my 4 string.

My final reflections are that yes, the Titan 48 puts out massive amounts of bass on minor amounts of power and stays tight and clean while doing it. We generally run services at an average volume around 85db with peaks into the mid 90's and a single Titan sounded relaxed and effortless while keeping pace even as I pushed things and measured average volumes last night around 95db well beyond what most people will ever hear through the system.

Thanks Bill for making my dreams achievable.