Mackie - sr1530

Active electronics work miracles that a passive crossover can't.

The crude coil-and-capacitor crossovers in many passive speaker systems are a major source of compromised sound quality. Phase and frequency problems are hard to avoid (which might be why there aren't more three-way passive systems around... a three-way passive crossover adds twice as many chances for distortion...). Plus, a passive crossover can eat up as much as 30% of amplifier power.

The SR1530 has what amounts to a whole rack of sophisticated electronics built in, including...

Phase-accurate electronic crossover with sharp 18dB per octave slopes. Because it's located before the amplifiers, no power is lost

Electronic phase alignment. The output of all three transducers must be "in phase" when it reaches your audience's ears. Maintaining phase alignment is expensive and cumbersome with a passive crossover. The SR1530's electronics maintain alignment and eliminate anomalies so that your audience hears clearer sound that stays consistent over more room area.

Electronic time correction. Horns can excite room air faster than big cone woofers (it's that ole physics thing we went on and on about earlier). If no correction is applied, highs and mids will arrive at your audience's ears sooner than low frequencies and the overall sound is "smeared" (Drawing J). The solution is to give the LF transducer's output a "head start" by delaying higher frequencies (Drawing K). The SR1530 uses an elegant electronic delay system that's far more accurate and distortion-free than the clunky "choke" solutions used in passive systems.

Above: Poor pattern control (grey areas) is the result of uneven dispersion at various frequencies. The speaker may do OK at 1KHz but "beam" increasingly narrow patterns at higher frequencies.

The SR1530 has even dispersion at all frequencies. So everyone hears the same thing, no matter where they're sitting (or dancing... or moshing...or, if it's an overly long sermon, sleeping.)

Three separate dedicated FR Series™ amplifier modules... each optimized for its own transducer.

Ask the folks who design the REALLY big touring systems. They'll tell you that one of the keys to accurate sound is tailoring the amplifiers to the transducers 2. You can do that with a church/club-sized passive three-way system by tripling the number of power amplifiers and adding external electronic crossovers and delay units. But the cost and complication factors usually rule this out.

Because the power amps are built into the SR1530, we can provide you with a perfectly-tailored, tri-amplified system.

• Each module is designed to deliver the right power and current to its transducer. This allows incredible efficiency: Although rated at a total of 500 watts, the three SR1530 modules deliver the equivalent of over 1200 watts of external amplifier power in a comparable passive system.

• Each module is also designed to handle the exact impedance behaviors of each transducer. In a conventional system with passive crossover, an external power amp, and X feet of speaker cable, you're at the mercy of external factors that are very hard to control.

2 For example, low frequencies require higher current, more watts, and tighter damping to control cone movement than are required for highs (which have their own specialized amp requirements as well). This is a big reason why 3-, 4-, and 5-way passive concert systems often use completely different brands of external amplifiers for different frequency ranges.