Touring as a monitor engineer has taught me many tricks over the years. Here are some of my favorite pieces of advice for those who may be just starting out…

Audio Logs
Like Groundhog Day (or a symphony pops tour), I keep repeating the following: the best loudspeaker accessory is the simplest and cheapest.

If you have nothing better to do one day, find an hour to cut some 2 x 4 lumber into one-foot lengths and paint them black.

Alternatively, covering them with black gaffe tape, affectionately called “paint on a roll,” helps by providing a better grip with cabinet surfaces and smooth stage floors.

Clair’s 12AM is only one example of a floor monitor that often requires a block of wood to correct the angle at which it addresses a performer. A dozen should be included in every loudspeaker cable trunk.

The new CSM Series (shown right) of low-profile floor monitors from QSC include integral rear legs that provide up to 15 degrees of additional angle (in one-degree increments) to provide additional coverage upstage.

Fifteens or Twelves?
More than ever, the choice between 12- and 15-inch woofers presents a dilemma to sound companies and monitor engineers.

These days, with so many using in-ear monitors and carrying their own system, there’s a great chance that locally-provided or house wedges won’t even be needed for many shows, making it hard to pick one model of “rider friendly” wedge that will be used infrequently or simply for support acts.

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Single 12-inch floor monitors have gained in popularity due to their smaller size, smoother transition to the horn in the vocal range, and some also prefer dual 12-inch designs for greater “punch” at higher volumes. On the other hand, 15-inch monitors, although larger, provide more lows.

Usually the most important rider requirement after “bi-amped,” is that all wedges in a system are matched, allowing the engineer the false security of copying one monitor mix EQ to all of the other mixes.

Bi-amplified or Passive?
Most loudspeakers originally included built-in passive, high-power crossover networks to split the amplified signal and send lows to the woofer and the highs to the horn.

Today, most two-way loudspeakers can be bi-amped, powering woofer and horn with their own amp channels, with each amp channel filtered for the frequencies its driver reproduces with an active or line-level crossover. Not only are HF horns several times more efficient than LF cones, they also require less energy due to their portion of the frequency spectrum.

The advantage of bi-amped floor monitors is that when they’re pounded with kick drum or bass, the LF amplifier can peak without distorting or clipping the HF amp and its horn.

If you never need loud wedges in your venue or for your band, passive wedges can save money by both halving the number of amp channels and eliminating active crossovers.

A hybrid approach would be to use a number of passive wedges, while also supplying a couple of beefier bi-amped wedges for the drummer and bass player, as well as for the side-fills. There are many wedges that sound very good run passively on a single amp channel.

My favorite is the EAW SM-200, which can also be switched to bi-amp operation, and is a staple of many performing arts centers. Another favorite is the Turbosound TXD-12M passive-only floor monitor.

Self-Powered
Like all self-powered loudspeakers, self-powered floor monitors provide advantages and challenges. After the missing amplifier rack, the great advantage is that, as a closed system, the combination of drivers, processing and power in a single product provides extremely consistent results.

The accompanying challenge is that instead of a loudspeaker cable, each wedge must be supplied with its own signal from the monitor console and its own AC from a power distro. Solutions involving Edison-to-PowerCon cables with XLR stingers taped onto them, distributed from AC quad-boxes and male XLR fan-outs or sub-snakes are a common solution.

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Meyer Sound provides a VEAM multi-pin option for most of their self-powered products that puts AC power, audio and RMS data into a single connection, and the company’s recent self-powered MJF-212 employs dual 12-inch woofers and a 40-degree conical horn to minimize interaction with adjacent monitor mixes.

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