jay michael

Cant stop, wont stop.

Thankfully we live in the times of cheap and plentiful amplifier power. If you can manage without sophisticated control and monitoring you can find lots of options for amplifiers that can easily turn these drivers into molten lava. Take a look at companies like Admark, Cvr, Wasi just to name a few. For as little as 8 or 9 hundred usd you can get 15kilowatt 2 channels amps that can push their rated power into long sustained loads and sound great doing it with solid reliability. Pick yourself up a nice dsp from Linea Research, or one of the other leading brands and get a few of these amps and you will be loving it. Even on a 120 circuit you should be able to properly power 2 or 3 skrams without tripping breakers. These amps conveniently have power factor correction, so they will take what ever voltage you throw at them reliably

I really need to make an update to this video at some point, learned a lot since then and could offer a lot of clarification to this procedure.

Final form post! I’m declaring this the finished Ionic Sound System (I hope, haha). Countless hours, more money than I’d like to admit and I couldn’t be happier. My garage is full, the trailer is maxed out, my truck is at its limit of towing capacity. Josh, you have created something really special with the Skram design. The bass heads drool over them, live music kick drums sound insane, and techno beats sound clean, punchy and dynamic…. What else could you want? The perfect all rounder sub design, bravo! Headphones in!

I second going for the better driver, more of an investment upfront but it will never leave you wondering what you are missing. Good luck with the build! I'm currently piecing together another pair.

I think the combination of SH46 and Skram is just simply a great pairing sound and power wise. The horn loaded upper bandwidth of the Skram really compliments the sound character of the SH46, together they sound very clean with well defined impact, some would describe it as having "fast bass". For an example, If there is a genre of music that I've heard sound shit on a lot of sound systems, its psytrance. Something about those fast upper bass notes just seem to show the warts on many sound systems. The Sh46 Skram combo sounds better on psytrance than anything else I've ever heard, F1, Void, Turbo etc etc. On top of that, one of my biggest rental clients is a long standing local crew that specializes in bass music, dubstep, drum and bass etc. They like the Skrams so much they are now building their own. For reference, this same crew was previously a heavy renter of PK sound, which some people say is the yard stick for bass music subwoofer's. So yeah, the Skram is an exceptionally flexible cabinet, it really can do all the things well. To your original question, I would add that when my 6 Skram's start touching limiting, the Sh46's still have a few db of headroom to go. Personally I'd say the appropriate sub to sh46 ratio would be 6 to 7 skrams per pair of sh46. I've got another pair of SH46 on the way, with a couple more Skrams in the cnc cue, if I have another successful summer next year maybe Ill cut up another 4. Th118 vs Skram, I think Josh would be a better person to answer that one... they must be fairly close in output overall, but I'm just speculating

I'm using the 21sw152. Sh46's can get stupid loud, especially when bi-amped. Two pair of them can cover 1500 to 2000 people for electronic dance music. While the Skram can really boogie, its still a medium sized cabinet compared to other types of designs. Pretty typically for the Danley guys to recommend 6 th118's per pair of sh46, so I'd say my assessment is pretty accurate. This would be for heavy bass music mind you, for techno you could probably get away with fewer

My pair of Danley sh46 are a pretty good match for 6 skrams, but they still outrun them a bit. I think 8 skrams would be the perfect balance. I've got another pair of skrams in the cutting phase, and another pair of sh46 on the way. Lots of skrams popping up in my area, there will be 12 in my city pretty soon, as well as 8 or 10 on the island. Been some planning discussing how to get them all in the same place sometimes soon I'm planning an after summer report soon, was hectic busy with lots of great gigs

Interesting experiment for sure. My personal take away is use 240v if available. If you don't have access you can still get solid performance from 120v plugs, just ensure you aren't overloading your amplifiers with too many speakers. On 120v I run 1 amplifier per 2 skrams on a 4ohm load and can achieve likely 90-95% of what can be achieved using 240v. don't expect to get the most of tough 2ohm loads from 120volt. Of course with 120v you will draw twice the amperage, deal with more heat and that may but extra strain on your gear.

Finally spent some sheckles to have a proper power panel build to run my amps on 240v which isn’t super common up here in most venues. While subtle, things felt a little cleaner and tight and amps ran noticeably cooler. We knocked some bottles off the wall of the bar which was a first so it seemed to have helped https://youtu.be/rqMiTLL15s8

While the limiters are basic on the dbx units I think they are enough to get by. I ran a Pa2 for probably close to 7 or 8 years and never burnt up any drivers. The venu360 is a big step up in functionality and sound quality but at that price there should be lots of good options out there. Personally I think if you are running your system into limit hard enough to think your limiter isn't up to the job the problem isn't your limiter, its that you don't have enough system for the job. I haven't needed to run my Skram's or my Danley's into limiting yet, if the day comes that it is required ill just start cutting up more wood

Sorry no experience with the Sanway stuff but there is a lot of info out there regarding their offerings. Those prices on reverb are pretty crazy, real world pricing from a rep should be about 50-60% of those listed prices.

No problem, I agree that article really simplified things on my end. Following the recommendations within, I have a bunch of shows under the bridge at this point and between monitoring magnet temps or getting hands on drivers in my paraflex cabinets I feel confident my drivers are well protected and performing excellent at powers higher than I would have run them using many of the "rules of thumb" I had gathered in other resources. On that note, I am super happy with my XTA DPA100 amplifier. Its a bit spendy but considering the onboard dsp with 4 channels of dsp outputs for controlling of "slave amplifiers" I really think XTA hit a home run with these units. Great sound quality and easy to use software, lots of power onboard, highly recommended. I've done some smaller shows running my big Danley's plus 4 subs run entirely off the single Dpa100 on a single 15amp circuit with no problems. Nice and efficient power.

I cant speak for the 18tbx100 option but I have some thoughts on the amplifiers you listed. I have powered my Skrams using the CVR's, a Powersoft K10, an Admark k420 and Wasi w15k's. All of these amps work great and will give similar results. I would rate the CVR, K10 and Wasi so close in performance I doubt you could tell the difference between them in a blind test. Some people have stated that they think the Admark may have a slight advantage over the cvr on tone but I haven't experienced any evidence to support this, but I have only played around with their 4 channel models vs their 2 channel models. I don't think you can go wrong with any of those options.

Well said tahoe, the overbuilt heavy and robust 21sw152 is meant for high power mayhem, at low volumes I wouldn’t consider it delicate and nuanced. I’m currently using a direct radiating reflex in my living room using a light weight high sensitivity driver and it’s much better suited for the size of the room. Even at low to moderate levels the Skrams were knocking plaster off the roof of my living room, the design is just not meant for home use in my opinion. Perhaps a lighter duty more efficient driver in the skram could work really well in your situation but I don’t have the experience to back that up. where is this war machine truck of yours Tahoe? We should meet up and let our Skrams have a play date haha

Sound quality wise, I'd take skrams over double 18's all day every day.

I have a fairly small listening room at home as well and at one point I had a pair of skram's with sm60f set up. They were pretty exciting for certain types of music, live music recordings in particular were really incredible. I wouldn't have kept them in there though, they were simply too brutish and over excited the room even at lower volumes. If you do try this I would recommend using a different driver than the 21sw152. I think somewhere in this thread someone made some listening impression comments on various drivers and the 21sw152 was characterized as darker sounding compared to some lighter cone options. The 21sw152 is still one of the top drivers for war volume applications, but I think there would be better options for low volume listening.

Yes I have a pair of handles only on the hatch. Standing upright we can lift them 2 persons using the handles on the hatch as well I rounded the upper panel on the mount to serve as a carrying point on the front. I also have casters on the hatch side so the cabinet can be turned onto the wheels for easy rolling. I wouldn’t estimate the cabs are closer to 180 pounds but I haven’t weighed them to confirm. They can be stacked pretty easy with 4 people.

This is a great room to play in, its been properly sound treated due to it being a live music venue. This system crushes in this space

I haven't man, sorry. Hopefully someday the Skram will get the full testing treatment, I would think the Skhorn results should be a pretty good representation of what to expect obviously with lower output. The Skram also has larger vents so overall we would expect 2 skrams to outperform a single skhorn. At the end of the day it comes down to cabinet size. The Skrams 36x34x24 dimensions makes it a real compact 21" cabinet, I doubt any diy plan packs as much punch and deep extension in those dimensions. I can move these around on my own but they are at the very edge of what I would call manageable if its just you. If you have a dedicated crew that will help you move them into storage at 5am then perhaps look into larger cabinets

Have a bit of an interesting field use report for my Skrams. I recently added new processing to my system using an XTA DPA 100. It’s a pretty interesting 4 channel amp, which I am using to bi-amp my Danley sh46 cabs. It also featured 4 channels of output control to add processing to my slave sub amplifiers. I used the information within this XTA/MC2 document on limiters to set up protection on my sub amps. https://audiocore.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/XTA-Application-Note-DPA-Amps-Limiter-Settings.doc.pdf using the chart within this document it says to set up the 21sw152 at 86.9 volts for limiting, minus 1db for safety margin. Having always been a little hesitant on knowing just how hard I can safely drive my Skrams I added a 2 wire thermocoupler temperature sensing system to 1 of the cabinets to monitor magnet temperature. 1 wire is mounted on the external circumference of the magnet, the other right next to the vent on the end of the magnet body. last night I provided sound for a local dubstep crew, 7 hours of continuous deep sine wave bass. Peak volume was held for about the 3 final hours of the night, at maximum I was running about 2db down from where limiting would engage. Monitoring throughout the night, magnet temperature peaked at 44 degrees Celsius. This was also in a packed sweaty room that was raining condensation from the roof. pretty interesting to get some real Information about what the drivers are doing deep within the skram cabinets under real world conditions. I had previously come across a statement from Bennet Prescott who works with B&C saying that the 21sw152 can sustain 100 degrees magnet temperature without thermally damaging the coil. Previously I had been limiting these drivers to around 50 volts, it seems that in the Skram alignment we should be able to safely push them beyond that a bit without getting too much temperature build up. This of course may change for other types of music, I will continue to report back when I can speak to temps I’m seeing when doing other types of music shows. Data is beautiful. Always a pleasure getting to flex these cabinets, in a town where double 18’s rule, the Skrams are raisins eyebrows and making lots of new fans.

Mine don’t, but they have a newer dsp model that might

Dave released an interesting video regarding bridge mono use. I gotta give it another watch or two to digest it more. This is something I’ve never come across, is anyone in here utilizing this technique? Seems to offer some nice benefits. https://youtu.be/HYbvA1DOR9A

Yeah man, just a pair of 3002’s on the 6 Skrams on 15 amp plugs, the venue has shit for power. Still zero complaints, they work hard, stay cool and sound great. Think the k10 is getting lonely staying at home all the time, I’ve actually put it up for sale

I was running about 20% down from where the start of the limiters would engage during the headliner slot, so yeah lots of headroom remaining. I feel like I’ve had some breakthroughs this summer with tuning, I can get things sounding real full and impactful without it ever feeling tiring or abrasive, it’s a real pleasure to listen to. Open invite dude, I’m a big fan of alien technology, let’s set up a play date another clip recorded from the mezzanine upstairs, notice the bass warping the video recording…. Some serious pressure going down https://youtu.be/_Y7Y0FqIJfw