Things to Consider Before Building a Midsized PA System

Captive or for hire?

PreSonus Air12 speakers are light, loud, and flexible.

Defining your audience is important when putting a sound system together, but in a medium-size PA, it is critical. Are you primarily putting a system together for a single band, or are you going to be renting in lots of different applications? Will you always be in a club, or do you have some outside shows already planned?
If you have a primary customer, then you want to choose equipment that is optimized for quick, dependable, and repeatable set up in that application. Cases that allow you to leave things connected will speed deployment and allow you to spend less time hunting for cables and accessories.
If you do events at lots of different venues, then flexibility is key. Speakers that can be used as either mains or monitors, like the PreSonus Air12, can be used in multiple applications. They also have microphone level inputs and an onboard mixer. This allows you to show up with just a pair of speakers if the gig only requires tracks from an iPhone and a microphone.

Passive or powered?

JBL PRX415 — passive doesn’t have to mean lower quality.

The range of benefits that powered speakers bring to any situation has been covered extensively. They can be more flexible, they are harder to blow up, and they are carefully matched to the amplifier inside of them, which makes them sound great. Sweetwater has some great systems based around powered speakers, including this Midas M32R package.
However, if you are playing a lot of outdoor gigs, a powered speaker may not be the perfect choice. How are you going to get power to the speaker if it is 100 feet from an outlet? What are you going to do if it starts raining?
A passive speaker like the JBL PRX415 can withstand the rain, while your amplifiers are protected under a tent near your console or under the stage. They can still be used as a main or monitor and are easier for you to service on your own if something should go wrong — which may be just what the doctor ordered if an excited crowd knocks a speaker over during a gig.

Wedges or In-ears?

RF Venue RF Explorer — better safe than sorry!

Like powered speakers, there are lots of benefits to using in-ear monitors (IEM). Lower stage volume and decreased likelihood of feedback are two key benefits. Wireless IEMs also add expense, and complexity, and require someone to pay attention to all those individual mixes.
There is something very satisfying about having a powerful floor wedge spraying you with audio while you are on a stage. Sometimes that feeling can draw a more inspired performance from a musician. A package like this Soundcraft Si Impact and JBL SRX800 gives you the mix power to start with wedges and transition to in-ear monitors when the time makes sense.
The flip side is that if you are setting up in multiple locations, there are more variables that have to be taken into account. The position of the monitors and size of the room impact the frequencies that can feed back, making ringing out the system more complicated. An in-ear system stabilizes that monitor mix. Even if it is not perfect, it will be far closer than listening to the same mix through an open wedge on a brand-new stage.
Of course, with the FCC shuffling the wireless spectrum around on us, as described in this article, there is also complexity in making wireless monitors work dependably. Keep in mind that adding one more channel of wireless doesn’t increase the amount of complexity a little bit; it doubles it. While getting six to eight channels of wireless working may not stress you out, getting a ninth channel could have you pulling your hair out. A dedicated spectrum scanner like the RF Venue RF Explorer can make your life a whole lot simpler.
How many outputs do I need?
It used to be imperative that you carefully counted up the number of inputs you needed as you chose a console, but now most digital consoles allow you to buy 32 mic inputs pretty inexpensively. You can increase your inputs by adding stage boxes or cascading a second console.
Outputs, on the other hand, are not always so easy to come by. A lot of digital consoles have sets of multipurpose outputs. This means that a number that looks like a lot of outputs goes down quickly as you start hooking up speakers. Main left and right outputs take up two of those outputs, and I like to drive my subwoofers from an aux, so there go two more of those outputs. If I started with eight, I only have four left, and even if I started with 12 or 16, it’s important to remember that although a mono send to a floor wedge is acceptable, people using in-ear systems generally expect stereo. This means that if I started with 12 general-purpose outputs and used four for my PA speaker sends, I can only build four discrete stereo mixes on a console with the remaining outputs.
A console like the Allen & Heath SQ7, which we include in this custom package, can expand its outputs to suit almost any need. This kind of feature is generally limited to high-end digital consoles.
Expandability and future-proofing

QSC KLA12 is flexible and powerful.

That leads us directly to our final consideration for building a PA: future-proofing a purchase. A mixer may suit your needs today, but will that continue? Two mixers that cascade together are a great choice if you normally use them in two different places and only need a bunch of extra inputs once or twice a year. They are not such a great choice if you need to take two big mixer cases to every show.
Likewise, when you look at a mixer, will it support more than one stage box at a time, and what are the maximum input and output channel counts? A console like the DiGiCo S21 might cost a bit more on the front end, but it could easily pay for itself in its ability to simply upgrade and keep up with your increased demands.
Speakers are another place to look at future-proofing. You can always double the number of speakers to increase your total SPL output by 3dB for a bigger show, but not all speakers are designed to combine elegantly. Setting up several point source boxes close to each other can cause lobing and comb filtering, making your job harder and the sound less pristine.
Fixed arcuate line arrays like the QSC KLA12 are specifically designed to combine and can smoothly move from pole mounted to flown in the air. A single box can sit on a stage lip for a front fill; two can mount on a pole over a sub for a corporate gig, or up to five can hang in the air. This makes them a very flexible choice for a PA when you don’t know what you are going to be doing from day to day.

Obviously, there are lots of things to consider when you are trying to make the perfect PA purchase. Give your Sweetwater Sales Engineer a call at (800) 222-4700 to start designing a system that will do what you need it to today and into the future.
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