I don't play live anymore but the principle now is the same as it was back then.

To get louder and keep it clean, you need to move more air..... in other words, more speakers and more amplifier power. It's really as simple as that.

With one of my early bands, we started with a Kustom briefcase PA with 130 watts out into a pair of 15" speaker/horn cabinets. We started to get bigger, better paying clubs and the 130w PA didn't cut it any more. We went to double bass bins, double mid cabs, and double horn tweeter arrays on each side of the stage with close to 2000watts into the stacks. We didn't necessarily become louder, but the result was nice headroom and the clarity of the sound was exceptional. Yeah it could be loud, but the real payoff was the clarity of the sound for the audience. The old Kustom 130 became our sidefill monitors. Instead of our sound tech having to run the PA volume on 10, he could run on 6 or 7 and it sounded so much better. No more distortion from gagged wide open volume controls and amps/speakers running the redline to cut through.

Obviously, you don't need a 2KW PA system, but the idea is the same. More speakers and more power gets the clarity and the head room you need. How you get to that point is totally up to you.

Take your existing system and add more of the Bose cabinets. True story: A local band at the time used a modular setup. They didn't use any crossovers on their PA. The used Yamaha passive cabinets. They had 16 of them total and 8 amps to deliver the power. So when they went into big clubs, they stacked 8 per side.... and fed one channel of the amp to one cabinet. Each amp channel only had to power one PA cabinet. Talk about clean sounding..... wow. When they went into smaller clubs, they used one or two per side and amps accordingly. Scale up, scale down as needed. In the bigger clubs the only difference was they were moving more air.

You might want to consider that kind of approach. Use more of the exact same model powered speakers. Add a second one or even a pair per side for 4. You are moving more air, you have double or quadruple the power, and they are still easy to carry and set up.

Last edited by Guitarhacker; 05/01/19 07:25 AM.
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