Yup, they’re blown.
In honour of the last day before the holiday, Steve (electric guitar) and Ken (african percussion) decided to get together to do some jamming yesterday. I had my laptop and a usb keyboard at work, which is all I need to make music, so I figured I’d join them.
Unfortunately, all I had to play through were the Logitech Z-4 speakers from off my desk. Now, these are perfectly reasonable computer speakers — better for gaming and techno music than general listening, but not bad. The thing is, when you’re competing with djembes, dunduns, and killer guitar rifs you have to be loud. And despite being plenty loud enough for my office, the Z-4s just couldn’t compete. Somewhere about twenty minutes into the jam session, I realized that every patch I played sounded like it had a wee bit of extra distortion added; after about an hour, this had progressed to that sound that guitarists lovingly call “crunch”. Yup, they’re blown.
Rather than just replacing the speakers with new ones that would also be destroyed the next time I got an opportunity to play live, I decided to look for something with a bit more oomph. My constraints were:
- no distortion,
- good dynamic range, and
- (with luck) usable for both keyboards and my cello.
I looked around a bit before I found something that seemed like it had potential, which didn’t cost multiple arms and legs: the Behringer K1800FX.
I picked one up from Ottawa Pianos today. So far it seems pretty promising. As usual, Behringer has loaded it up with features for a very nice price (< $400):
- 4 channel input mixer (with mic pre-amp)
- 7 band equalizer
- auto feedback cancellation (excellent for the cello!)
- a reasonable mix of effects
The sound quality is good, but a little “boxy”. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds good, but I guess when you’re used to studio monitors, you get spoiled. It is however, definitely loud.
Hey guys, next time I’ll be ready!
Update: Ah, it’s not feedback cancellation it’s feedback detection. You still have to use the EQ to remove it. Oh well.
That’s too bad about the office speakers… sorry… Hope they’re still ok for the office. I’ve got all the tracks laid down from the recording, will be putting them up shortly.
No worries, Ken. Because of where my office was, I typically couldn’t use those speakers anyway — the front office staff complained.