Help - need a good way to elevate floor standing PA speakers

I've recently started helping with sound at my church. We have some pretty sweet floor speakers (JBL JRX125's). The problem is they are blowing people's heads off in the front rows and not loud enough in the back. Elevating them about 4 feet or so (they're already up 2-3 feet being on stage) should be enough. I'm having a hard time thinking of a good way to do this, short of building a stand or cabinet of some sort. These things are really heavy, by the way (94 lbs). I don't know if there are any tripod stands that can support that kind of weight, but, even if there are, I don't think we have enough room on stage to use a tripod stand.

Anybody have any good ideas?

Find a beam, buy some chain, and hang em.

We have been dealing with sound issues at our church for a while now.
Without a better description I don't know how much help this will be, but I will give it a shot.

1) what is the sound pattern on the speakers you have? I am assuming they have a woofer, tweeter and a horn. My guess is the horn is your problem. Some horns are made to disperse the sound over a certain amount of degrees and in a certain spread. Some spread the sound up and down, other spread it side to side. Some of the newer speakers have a removeable horn that you can change the spread. By raising the speakers you might get a better dispersement of sound, but then again you might loose your front rows.
2) How big an area are you trying to cover? If your area is extremely deep, then you might want to consider a second group of speakers to get sound to the back. When you said the front is getting blasted and the rear is getting nothing, you might not have enough power to get the sound to the back.
3) one other thing to consider is moving the speakers from shooting straight at the front rows, maybe angleing them to the ceiling might be an idea as well.
I know that it took us about 5-6 services before we found the sweet spot...
Good luck!!

The speakers in question are JBL's with 2 15" woofers and a horn tweeter. We had those sitting on top of a pair of 3-way Mackie speakers that weren't turned on (why we had two good sets of floor speakers in the youth room I don't know). It worked pretty well with the speakers being elevated up 3-4 feet that way. Then our worship leader moved the Mackies to the main sanctuary, which is a lot bigger and only had ceiling mounted fill speakers, which were really not cutting it at all.

We had one youth service with the speakers sitting straight on the stage like that. It didn't work out very well. It was too loud and harsh up front, and not loud enough in the back.

It would be good to elevate both sets of speakers.

one other thing to consider is moving the speakers from shooting straight at the front rows, maybe angleing them to the ceiling might be an idea as well.


This is a great idea.

It worked pretty well with the speakers being elevated up 3-4 feet that way. Then our worship leader moved the Mackies to the main sanctuary, which is a lot bigger and only had ceiling mounted fill speakers, which were really not cutting it at all.


Giant, then I would build some stands the size of the Mackies. If it is for a Uth sanctuary you can get by with stuff you could not do in big church. I would build a plywood box, make it so you can store stuff in it if need be, king of like a crate, paint it up and put them on stage. Good enough!

The other option is to use some of the small lightweight tables for a stand. Put the tables up when not using them.

If it is a youth room we are talking about, then there is only one way to solve thi problem.... hold a few car washes and other such fundraisers, and with the proceeds buy a pair of 2x18 subwoofers, place them sideways on the floor, and set the speakers in questiion securely on top of those. Only this time around you will need to be sure to have all four cabinets on...
(Sorry, I couldn't resist))

Actually, there are several sources of speaker cabinet-building parts and accessories, and among those parts and accessories can be found several sizes of sockets intended for placing speakers on the regular commercially available ajustable stands (IE: Guitar Center...) They are not hard to install, and pretty cheap.
That way you might have a lot more versatility with your speaker set up.

Try www.stewmac.com to start... then do a google search, and search ebay.

Dan

* EDIT
I just searched Stew-Mac and to my surprise didn't find much... but here is another dealer with exactly what you need...
http://www.usspeaker.com (http://www.usspeaker.com/homepage.htm)
Click the link to "Hardware" and then the link to "TOP HATS."
Also, look in the side menu for Speaker Stands...

Dan

"Da-Lite Deluxe Projecto-O-Stand"

Do a Google search on the above.
I used these years ago with some heavy speakers.
And they will hold up to 125 lbs.
Hope this helps!

Steve

Find a beam, buy some chain, and hang em.

Oh that will look nice:shock:

Thanks for the replies. We've found some stuff to elevate the speakers on, although I would like them to come up a little more. The stands at USSpeaker look promising.