Watt Unpowered
What size pa system do I need to play live music in a bar? how many watts?
powered or unpowered mixer? how many watts per channel @ how many ohms? speaker size watts?
yes, it's true there's many variables and it's best to get pro advice for your situation, but perhaps this will give you a good starting place.
when i was playing in bars with a fairly loud band we used a powered stereo mixer that had 200 or 300 watts per side (or was it 250 a side?). this covered about 100 or so people and most of bar, and worked well for most of the places we played. the areas or tables our sound system didn't reach was where people that wanted to talk or thought we were too loud would hang out.
we only used one side of the built in stereo amp for the mains, which were two two-way 12" cabinets rated at 8 ohms each. one cab was plugged into the output of the board, and the other cabinet was plugged into that. two 8 ohm cabinets plugged together in this way (parallel) takes the load down to 4 ohms, which most power amps can handle. there's a link below the explains ohms and speaker combination.
because we played loud, we also needed monitors. we had four 16 ohm monitors, which we ran off the other side of the power amp in the same way. four 16 ohm speakers ran in parallel also equals 4 ohms. again, our amp could handle that. (basically, a Stereo Power amp is two mono power amps in one unit.)
our board had a switch on it that allowed the mains to run one side of the amp and the monitors on the other internally, but some don't so may have to use a jumper (a short cable) to run from the main mono output, or one of either side of the mains to the power amp input, and another jumper from the monitor output to the other side's input on the power amp section, making sure you have the main speakers and monitor speakers hooked to the according outputs...if you decide to run your system in this configuration.
when hooking up the speakers, be aware that most m.i. power amps cannot handle a 2 ohm load (i..e do not try to run four 8 ohm cabinets on one side of a power amp.) if your monitors are rated at 8 ohms, you will be only be able to run two of them.
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