Looking for a power amp for vocals

beatdat

Senior Member
My band has found a new rehearsal space, and I'm looking for suggestions on a suitable power amp to buy that will handle vocals well.

The room itself is about 18' x 22', with 8.5' ceilings. We have 2x 15" Yorkville speaker cabinets that we will use as the main vocal speakers, and 2x 12" Yorkville speaker cabinets that we plan to use as floor monitors. The 15" speakers were bought new in the beginning of this year, and the 12" speakers have been around for some time (they aren't ours, but belong to the other band sharing the space). The mixer we'll be using is a Mackie 1402 model that is about 20 years old and in pretty good condition.

We need a power amp to handle the four speakers. Our music is hard rock, and our singer wants to make sure that any amp we get will be powerful enough to handle his vocals, plus any back-up vocals - it would also be nice to have the headroom to comfortably add another instrument into the mix (eg. keyboards, acoustic guitar, etc.), should the need arise.

Any recommendations on a good power amp that can handle all of this? I don't have much experience with this, so I'm hoping some of you can help me out. We're in Toronto, ON, and Long & McQuade is my go-to store for most of my musical needs, so something they sell would be easiest for us to check out. But, we're also amenable to buying something used.

Thanks.
 

I appreciate the resource, thanks!

Ohms are very important too. @dboomer laid that out also. Having the wrong ohms will fry your gear just as quick as too much power.

Yeah, I have a cursory understand of the importance of matching impedances - which I once learned the hard way. Fortunately, my drum teacher also has a solid knowledge of these kinds of things, but it's been so long that he's been in the market for such things, that he doesn't know what's out there these days. I'm sure, though, if I showed him something I was looking at, he'd be able to give the requisite thumbs up/down.


I was just looking at this Yorkville Amp. The price is reasonable and I think it could do the job. What do you guys think?
 
A bit of a detail here, but...

Can you prop up the 15” boxes and use them as floor monitors? In a room that small, you don’t really need “mains”. What you really want is a floor wedge for everyone in the band. Less feedback and hearing troubles this way.

Find out what the continuous wattage rating on the floor wedges is, and choose an amp with the same rating. The 15” will probably have a higher rating, but you don’t want to send too much power to the floor monitors. And you’ll still have enough power for the mains.
 
A bit of a detail here, but...

Can you prop up the 15” boxes and use them as floor monitors? In a room that small, you don’t really need “mains”. What you really want is a floor wedge for everyone in the band. Less feedback and hearing troubles this way.

Find out what the continuous wattage rating on the floor wedges is, and choose an amp with the same rating. The 15” will probably have a higher rating, but you don’t want to send too much power to the floor monitors. And you’ll still have enough power for the mains.

Interesting take. I'll be heading into the space tonight and take photos of the 15" speakers, and then post them here tomorrow.

To clarify, are you suggesting putting the 15" speakers on the floor as monitors, and using the 12" speakers on their stands as mains?
 
I was just looking at this Yorkville Amp. The price is reasonable and I think it could do the job. What do you guys think?
I personally have no experience with Yorkville, but know a bass player who swears by them.

Most of the tech specs are over my pay grade. I had to know about wiring, ohms, amps, stuff like that. Gates, limiters, that stuff is over my head.

It doesnt have a cooling fan or 1/4" jacks. Some folks might have a problem with this, some not. Me personally, I can work around the jack but would want the cooling fan. But I dont live in Canada either, it gets hot here.
 
I personally have no experience with Yorkville, but know a bass player who swears by them.

Most of the tech specs are over my pay grade. I had to know about wiring, ohms, amps, stuff like that. Gates, limiters, that stuff is over my head.

It doesnt have a cooling fan or 1/4" jacks. Some folks might have a problem with this, some not. Me personally, I can work around the jack but would want the cooling fan. But I dont live in Canada either, it gets hot here.

Yorkville is (I'm pretty sure) a Canadian brand. It's pretty ubiquitous around my parts, and seems respected enough, but I can't say I've ever heard anyone rave about their products.

Good point on the 1/4 jacks, and the cooling fan, too! While it gets pretty damn cold here in the winter time, it gets hot during rehearsal - even during the winter! I'll keep both things in mind. Thanks, again.
 
You’re getting two amps, right? One for your mains and one for your monitors. That’s usually how it’s done because one is pushing more for the mains.

Good point!

The 15" speakers are mine and my bass player's, so we're looking into an amp for them.

The 12" speakers belong to the band we're sharing the space with, and they have an amp for it. It's not a very good amp, though, and it can barely push the 12" speakers, so if we can get an amp for all 4 speakers (I'm assuming they can be daisy chained together), that would be great. If not, we'll only power our 15" speakers with the amp we're looking to buy, and we'll use the other band's amp and speaker for the monitors. That'll probably mean connecting both amps to my Mackie mixer. Does that sound about right?
 
Interesting take. I'll be heading into the space tonight and take photos of the 15" speakers, and then post them here tomorrow.

To clarify, are you suggesting putting the 15" speakers on the floor as monitors, and using the 12" speakers on their stands as mains?

No. Use ALL the speakers as floor monitors. One for (approximately) each band member. You don’t really need “mains” in the traditional sense because you won’t have an audience.
 
Good point!

The 15" speakers are mine and my bass player's, so we're looking into an amp for them.

The 12" speakers belong to the band we're sharing the space with, and they have an amp for it. It's not a very good amp, though, and it can barely push the 12" speakers, so if we can get an amp for all 4 speakers (I'm assuming they can be daisy chained together), that would be great. If not, we'll only power our 15" speakers with the amp we're looking to buy, and we'll use the other band's amp and speaker for the monitors. That'll probably mean connecting both amps to my Mackie mixer. Does that sound about right?
Yes you can daisy chain speaker cabs if they are set up for it. If not, you can split the signal with the cable and a splitter box.
 
Good point!

The 15" speakers are mine and my bass player's, so we're looking into an amp for them.

The 12" speakers belong to the band we're sharing the space with, and they have an amp for it. It's not a very good amp, though, and it can barely push the 12" speakers, so if we can get an amp for all 4 speakers (I'm assuming they can be daisy chained together), that would be great. If not, we'll only power our 15" speakers with the amp we're looking to buy, and we'll use the other band's amp and speaker for the monitors. That'll probably mean connecting both amps to my Mackie mixer. Does that sound about right?
Well if
You daisy chain them together, well, use one out put for two speakers and the other output for the other two, the volume will be the same for each pair. You could use one side for mains and the other side for the two monitors, I’ve done that before. But when you plug in one speaker to one side, if you don’t have any control over it, it defaults to 8 ohms, when you daisy chain another speaker to that one, then it drops down to 4 ohms, so you get a bit more power but the sound gets dirtier as you add speakers. Not that I think it matters much in this instance, just something to know.

I know this is a money thing, but if you had a console with enough AUX outputs to cover your band, you could run everything into the console, then each member gets his own wireless in-ear unit and you’re done. I do this with my Devo band - so we have our own mixes, and the house engineer just has to mix for the house.
 
For added clarity, my suggestion is one amp for both sets of speakers. Connect the mains in series (i.e. daisy chained) to one of the amps outputs, and the monitors, in series, to the other output.

Amps are not terribly expensive these days, because of the newer, lightweight class D designs. I use to own a 1000W Crown and I rarely turned it up over “4”, in a pretty big club.
 
For added clarity, my suggestion is one amp for both sets of speakers. Connect the mains in series (i.e. daisy chained) to one of the amps outputs, and the monitors, in series, to the other output.

Amps are not terribly expensive these days, because of the newer, lightweight class D designs. I use to own a 1000W Crown and I rarely turned it up over “4”, in a pretty big club.

Running speakers in “series” is generally a bad idea as all the peaks and dips in frequency response add together. In “parallel” they tend to smooth out.

Also, it doesn’t matter what number you turn your amp up to, amplifiers always run at full gain. A volume control just acts to adjust how much signal you let in to be amplified.
 
Running speakers in “series” is generally a bad idea as all the peaks and dips in frequency response add together. In “parallel” they tend to smooth out.

Also, it doesn’t matter what number you turn your amp up to, amplifiers always run at full gain. A volume control just acts to adjust how much signal you let in to be amplified.

Series is not a “bad idea”, you just have to be aware of the resistance (ohms). And in semi-pro situations, it’s often that or nothing.

I can’t say whether your statement on amps running at full gain was true for this particular amp. It had some digital controls on the face which may have enabled it to function differently. I know for certain that turning it up all the way caused much more volume, to the point of feedback.
 
I don’t know of any commercially available speaker that you can run in series without physically re-wiring it or using a specialized series connecting box. So how are you suggesting that speakers can be connected in series? I’m not saying it is a bad idea but it does negatively affect frequency response smoothness. Guitarists often like ragged response but I can’t imagine a PA application where that would be a plus.
 
I don’t know of any commercially available speaker that you can run in series without physically re-wiring it or using a specialized series connecting box. So how are you suggesting that speakers can be connected in series? I’m not saying it is a bad idea but it does negatively affect frequency response smoothness. Guitarists often like ragged response but I can’t imagine a PA application where that would be a plus.

Huh. I’ve seen and owned passive (unpowered) boxes that were meant to be run that way. I had a pair of 12” Yamaha floor wedges, and the manual flat out diagrammed them in parallel and in series. These were older; 1/4 inch jacks only. Later, when these wore out, I had a friend solder in some speak-on jacks.
 
Perhaps there is some confusion as to series and parallel. For example, you can daisy chain EV QRX series cabinets. There is a switch on the input. Switch it to Bi-Amp and you can now daisy chain them. However, even though they are daisy chained they are still running parallel.

mu7cymtkzmm1gkzdk6md.jpg

This isnt one I did. It's quite ugly. Stickers upside down, S/N is crooked, no paint in the bottom of the panel recess. Whomever QC'd this cabinet needs a talking to.
 
“Daisy chain” in popular usage has unfortunately come to mean connecting in parallel. To an electrical engineer daisy chain means wiring in series.
 
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