My new powered speakers

I decided it was time to upgrade my powered speakers.

First, lemme explain. Powered speakers are speakers with a built in amplifier. In my opinion, these make a great deal of sense for a karaoke DJ. Less stuff to haul around. If you want a little more information on powered speakers, the other options, and the pros and cons, have a look at a previous blog in my series "So you wanna be a karaoke host?")

I have a set of Behringer B212A powered speakers. I am happy with them, but... You always have to be buying bigger toys, you know?  I had a gig with about 75 people. I felt the B212As were adequate, but just barely. When put on some dance music with a good thump going, I couldn't quite push the bass the way that I wanted to. I mean, do I want to come out of a gig being told that I was "adequate"? What guy wants to hear that word after a performance?

Does this fit with the specs? Each B212A puts out 250W RMS. Figgering at 10W per person, (from a blog of mine on watts), I could make up to 50 people happy with these speakers. Ok, that explains why I only made it up to adequate.

I had an outdoor gig last summer, and that convinced me I needed a little more power. I used the B212A speakers. Since I was outdoor, I need to make up for the bass that was floating away. I pushed the bass all the way up and listened to 500 W of woofer farting.

One way to solve this outdoor gig problem is to add power where the power is needed, that is, to add a subwoofer. Subwoofers are nice, since you only need to have one. (The stereo effect just doesn't work at those low frequencies.) They can sit right on the floor. (Higher frequencies get lost when there are obstacles around, so you normally put them somewhat above people's heads.) Since they can sit on the floor, and they are big and heavy, you can often use the subwoofer as the base to a speaker stand.

But subwoofers are big and heavy. Here is a sub from JBL that is roughly a 2 ft cube and weighs 89 lbs.That's more than I care to carry around, sorry.

So, I started researching a set of bigger powered speakers. Here is my list:, along with some of the specs.
 

Manufacturer	Model	Watts	Woofer	Freq resp	Weight	Price
Mackie	TH-15A	200	15"	50 Hz	36 lbs	$350
Peavey	PR 15D	270	15"	47 Hz	52 lbs	$480
Yamaha	MSR400	300	12"	50 Hz	51 lbs	$500
Behringer	B212D	345	12"	65 Hz	32 lbs	$280
Behringer	BR215D	345	15"	55 Hz	45 lbs	$330
Harbinger	HP115	350	15"	58 Hz	62 lbs	$700
Mackie	SRM450v2	400	12"	55 Hz	40 lbs	$600
JBL	EON515	450	15"	42 HZ	32.5 lbs	$700
EV	SxA360	500	12"	60 Hz	36 lbs	$800
Behringer	B512DSP	600	12"	??	65 lbs	$400
Behringer	B815	850	15"	45 Hz	51 lbs	$550
QSC	K12	1000	12"	48 Hz	41 lbs	$800

My first decision was to eliminated any of the speakers under 400 W. Why bother with anything smaller? That reduced the list to the following:

Manufacturer	Model	Watts	Woofer	Freq resp	Weight	Price
Mackie	SRM450v2	400	12"	55 Hz	40 lbs	$600
JBL	EON515	450	15"	42 HZ	32.5 lbs	$700
EV	SxA360	500	12"	60 Hz	36 lbs	$800
Behringer	B512DSP	600	12"	??	65 lbs	$400
Behringer	B815	850	15"	45 Hz	51 lbs	$550
QSC	K12	1000	12"	48 Hz	41 lbs	$800

Another important criteria for me was the weight. The B212As weigh about 36 lbs. I decided I didn't want to go much heavier than that. This threw out two Behringer speakers. The specs and price on the B512DPS were impressive, but 65 lbs?

To make the final decision, I went to my local Guitar Center to listen to them. I heard the SRM450v2, the EON515, and the K12.

I was expecting that the EON515 speakers, the only ones with a 15" woofer, would have the deepest, richest sound. Comparing the three, the SEM450v2 was the first to be eliminated. It just didn't have as much on the bass end. This specs predicted this. The SRM450v2 will go down to 55 Hz, whereas the other two are rated at 48 Hz and 42 Hz.

I flipped back and forth between the K12 and the EON515 for some time. Guitar Center has a nice board where you can easily toggle individual speakers on and off. After listening a while I grew to like the K12. The EON515 did have a good bass, but - my opinion - it felt a bit muddy. I don't think the midrange of the EON515 is as clear as the K12.

I went home with a pair of K12s. I love the sound.

I used these for an outdoor gig. I had to push the bass, as I expected, but the speakers were right there. Plenty of power to fill the spacious backyard, and the speakers sounded rich and clear.

Here's another nice thing about the speakers. The speakers have a small mixer on the back. You have separate volume controls for two mic inputs, or a mic input and an iPod. One channel has a pair of RCA jacks for your iPod. How cool is that?

Is karaoke a performance or a sing along?

Mitch Miller passed on this last month at the age of 99. He is best known for his early 60s TV show called Sing Along with Mitch.

Miller deserves a place in the history of karaoke, having pioneered the idea of using video to display words in sync with the music. For this, he has earned mention in the Wiki entry on karaoke. But Wiki is quick to point out that this was not karaoke, and not even a precursor.

The primary difference between Karaoke and sing-along songs is the absence of the lead vocalist. This renders most forms of sing-along songs as footnotes to Karaoke rather than precursors.

I suppose the whole meaning of the word (karaoke literally means "empty orchestra") supports relegating Mitch to the footnotes rather than claiming him as the inventor. But still I find this a bit disappointing.

It reminded me of some comments that showed up on my Milwaukee Karaoke blog. There were two conflicting reviews of a karaoke spot. Somewhere buried in the comments was a dichotomy... two different views of what karaoke is, or perhaps, two different reasons that someone would go to a karaoke bar.

The traditional answer to the question of "what is karaoke?" fits in with "empty orchestra" and the Wiki page. This traditional answer also fits in with the ubiquitous and completely erroneous statement that the definition of karaoke is "a method for the intoxicated to embarrass themselves". (This is a quote from US patent 7,551,161. Honest. Nothing could be further from the truth. Alcohol and karaoke have nothing to do with each other. The fact that there are 116 different bars in the Milwaukee area that offer karaoke is just coincidence.) The traditional answer is that karaoke is a performance.

But there is a different answer to the question of "what is karaoke?" I saw it when I did my first karaoke gig with teenagers. I see it at my gig at Bootleggers every night. Sure, there are people who get up to sing solos and duets. But there are a lot of people who get up in large groups. Ten people on stage is not uncommon. If the stage were larger, there might be twenty, or thirty. It is not uncommon for there also to be a crowd of people in front of the stage, singing along with the crowd of people on the stage.

This is karaoke in the style that Mitch Miller pioneered. Karaoke as a sing along.

The August 14 issue of Science News has an interview with Ian Cross, who is the director of the Centre of Music and Science at Cambridge. He drives home this same distinction between "music as a performance" and "music as a group thing":

In traditional societies, there are performers, but music is primarily interactive, so everybody participates and it's embedded in daily experience. ... I've worked with ethnomusicologists [people who study music across cultures] who play recorded music to members of non-Western groups and try to measure how they perceive and react to it. But these people don't think of a recording as music. They're bored by it. It makes no sense to them because it's not interactive.

This is just my little ethnomusicology, but I think the huge popularity of karaoke among younger folks has a lot to do with getting back to our roots of interactive music.

It's fun to sing at the Y

YMCA is a popular karaoke song. Who'da thunk? When I first realized this, it was a bit of a surprise. I need to explain a bit about rock history to understand why I say that.

Back when I was 16, my music genre was "rock", as exemplified by groups like Styx, Boston, Pink Floyd, Kansas, Jethro Tull, the Doors, and the Moody Blues. Today, this genre has become known as "classic rock". Don't get me wrong, I listened to some folk music and some Motown, and once in a while some earlier rock and roll... but my favorite was the classic rock.

I loved the depth of the music. It was not the standard four chord rock. There were instruments other than guitars and drums. The music was more freeform. The music was somewhere between symphony and rock and jazz.

And this was the music of the day.

In 1977, this changed. Donna Summer burst onto the scene. The Bee Gees became superstars (along with John Travolta) with the movie "Saturday Night Fever". And discos popped up everywhere.
At the time, I joked that there had been only one disco song ever written. It goes like this: THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP... There were a lot of different recordings of this one song. Different artists, different words, a little different take on the melody, but the same song: THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP...

My music genre was getting muscled out. The musical intricacies, the rhythm change ups, the non-standard instrumentation, and complex harmonies -- all gone. All replaced by THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP... I didn't own a T shirt that said "Disco Sucks", but I would have worn one if someone gave me one.

The Village People made their own recording of this one disco song. Yeah, they dressed up funny and did some stuff that was kind of a dance, but it was that same song.

My opinions have moderated a bit through the years. Today, I can hear "That's the way ..." on the radio and sing along on the  "uh huh uh huh", and not feel that I am a traitor to my genre. It might even bring back a fleeting memory of the discos that I visited back in 1977, the year I graduated from college. Some of those disco-related memories are actually pleasant.

But still, when I first heard YMCA done in karaoke, it was a surprise because it brought me back to the Disco Sucks era of music. The rest of the crowd seemed oblivious to this desecration of the ultimate musical form of the 20th century. People were having fun cuz everyone knew the words to the chorus and they knew to make a Y, an M, a C, and an A with their arms above their body.

And that brings me around to the point of this blog. Last month, the YMCA went through rebranding and emerged with only one letter intact. They are now the Y.

No longer will people have to fumble as they go from the letter Y to the M, with the arms bent downward to the head. No longer will people need to get momentarily confused by whether the C points this way or that. And that last part... where your bring your hands together to make the A?  I always messed that up.

No more will people get lost in the complex intricacies of that dance, because now it's just the Y. "It's fun to stay at the Y - - -. It's fun to stay at the Y - - -." Please try to remember to sing it correctly, without the MCA.