Makie SRM450 and SRM1801

I use the Mackie SRM450 V2's and a SRM1801 and apart from their weight for load in's and outs I love them.  The SRM450's sound fantastic and have a lovely wide dispersion.  I used them on their own for a little while and whilst they sounded great, the PA lacked that chest thumping power only a dedicated bass speaker can bring, so I bought an SRM1801.  Mackie claim that SRM450's and SRM1801 work great with each other, but just hooked up together straight off the decks they really don't.  In many venues the SRM1801 on it quietest setting seems wildly overpowered and causes nasty reverberations.  This means the mixers bass eq has to be turned down to stop it, causing the sound to be all wrong.  Even without this the sound is still not perfect.  The solution was to use a stereo 31band graphic equalizer between the decks and the speakers to allow the frequencies to be tweaked.  It turned out that just 1 or 2 low frequencies cause the nasty bass reverberations and the mid and top end needed a bit of adjustment to make the sound "come alive".  With a bit of playing the system can be tuned up to sound really good and made to sound optimum in each different venue with their different acoustic qualities.

Note that the SRM1801 has a rather major design flaw that Mackie don't like to talk about, but if you own one you'll more than likely be sending it in for repair at some point.  amphospital.co.uk offer a nice fix for this (its to do with the driver coil being wound so it can easily overheat and go short circuit and the amp output electronics not having sufficient protection I'm told) which is well worth doing before yours dies too.