About a week ago, one of my friends had this gig at the Sultan Hotel. In case you all do not know, it’s a boutique hotel at Jalan Sultan. Well, anyway, he was supposed to do his gig in one of the bars in the hotel called the Wonderbar. But at the last minute, on the day of the gig, he gets a call from the powers-that-be of the hotel, telling him that the place is booked and that he has to play outside.

Well, to be honest, my friend was a bit taken aback. What will he do for a sound system? No worries said the hotel. They provided him with a Yamaha MG166cx mixer and check this out, a stereo 1/4″ jack plugs into the headphone out socket of that mixer and the other end goes to an amplifier powering a couple of those Bose garden speakers….you know, those green ones that look like bloody mushrooms, the Bose Free Space 51s. In any case, not a single fader was pushed up on the mixer that was allocated to him. My friend hooks up his controller to the mixer and the channel where the controller is hooked up on has its PFL button pressed. It’s the PFL output that sends a signal to the amp driving those Bose mushrooms. Pretty crappy sound I must say.

In any case, I come by, saw the situation and asked him: “What the hell?” The reason why I say so is because I am looking at throwing an event at WonderBar but if they screw me up like how they screwed up my friend, its gonna look and sound like shit. So I did the next thing. I asked a friend who had speakers if I could borrow his. He said that he does not have any. So what do I do? I go get the trusty Yamaha Stagepas 500. After I came back and hooked them up, my gosh…the sound. It sounded so much better than the sound of those Bose mushrooms. In any case, the party lasted about an hour till the hotel told us that the sound from the Stagepas 500 was waking up the guests of the hotel. So at 0100 hrs, my friend shut the party down

Looks like I have to find out what happened. This does not sound good for events at The Sultan Hotel. Looks like I have to have a chat with them about this. yet again, the Stagepas 500 proves itself

A couple of days back, I was doing a roadshow and my trusty StagePas 500 was providing the audio. I used my Line 6 wireless microphone for vocals and hooked up my good old Nokia phone as the sound source. Needless to say, the show went well, except for one brief moment when the Stagepas went into thermal shutdown mode because of the hot weather. Just switching it off and on brought it back to life and all was well after that. The sound was clear and concise, as was expected of the StagePas 500 and people were commenting about the great sound of the system. This StagePas 500 is in its fourth year of use and is still going strong. Thanks Yamaha for making such a great product!

I snapped this picture at a Malay wedding tat was held in a void deck, a couple of days ago. As usual, I had great food to eat and was pleased to hear that the Yamaha Stagepas is still putting out fantastic sound, on this month, which will be its 4th anniversary. Thanks Yamaha for making such a versatile and great-sounding system

I have a Yamaha Stagepas, and it is into it’s sixth year of operation. I am very happy with it and it serves me well. I go have a small issue though. Just the other week, I discovered that I had some 12 AWG cables and I wanted to use it as speaker cable. Now the Stagepas only accepts 1/4″ TS cable. It doesn’t use Speakon connectors. So for those who have larger diameter speaker cables, how do you solve it?

It is simple. Get this fatter 1/4″ TS plug that can take fatter speaker cable. Some people, to get around it, strip the 12 AWG speaker cable and do not crimp the housing because it cannot fit inside the barrel. With this, all should fit and it is a practical solution. I am happy with my standard 16 AWG speaker cable so the 12 AWG speaker cable will be spared…for now. But if need be, I know what to do.

This was yet another Malay wedding with my Yamaha Stagepas providing sound reinforcement. This was the setup. They gave me a table, covered with a very thin piece of plastic. It was the same kind of plastic those plastic bags from the grocers are made of. I had to be very careful with it as it was so thin, it tended to tear if anything scratched it. That included the rubberised feet of the Stagepas mixer too! So I hooked it up, together with my Line 6 wireless microphone. You can also see my trusty Nokia 101 phone there too, providing test music while I did basic equalisation of the sound. The speakers had been setup and I had to throw speaker wire over the sewage pipes that are prevalent at the ceiling of most void decks in Singapore. This is so that I would not have to waste my cloth tape taping it to the floor. The only issue I faced was that the power supply was some distance away, near the wedding dias. So I had to use two of my power extension cords to reach it

Was the wedding a success? I will have to say it was. I had great food to eat, nice company to work with and an all in all great experience, as always, with Malay weddings. The bride’s parents were really nice and very accommodating. That is why I love doing Malay weddings. I always have a great time!

I happened to come across this yesterday while browsing the Internet. It seems that Laney are also in the portable PA game, with a setup that looks very much like the JBL EON 210p that I wrote about some time back. From the picture, those woofers like like they can really dish out loud volume but then again, looks can be deceiving. So let us get down with what this offering from Laney is

Apparently, The AH210 is Laney’s compact solution (look familiar?) to portable PA. This offering from Laney consists of two speaker enclosures equipped with a 10″ woofer and 1″ compression driver each. These speakers are connected to a clip-off 6 channel mixer with an on-board Digital Media Player capable of taking an SD card or a USB memory stick and Bluetooth to allow audio streaming from any Bluetooth equipped audio device. Now THAT, in my mind, is pretty good. The AH210 6 channel mixer features four XLR mic inputs and two phone-line level inputs. Each channel features Bass, Treble and Echo controls. The mixer section also has RCA inputs, plus a stereo AUX in, a monitor feed and RCA outputs.

Specifications-wise, this is what this AH210 has to offer:

• Integrated 6 channel mixer
• 2 x 400 watts
• 35mm pole stand fitting
• Neat Clip of storage compartment for cables
• Phantom power
• Clip off 6 Channel mixer
• Play music Via USB or Memory Stick
• Lightweight and portable
• Integrated MP3 player
• Item dimensions: 490mm x 315mm x 312mm (HWD)
• Carton dimensions: 555mm x 635mm x 365mm (HWD)
• Item weight: 18.70kg

Remember I said in the beginning that the speakers look beefy? Well, they must be to handle 2 x 400 watts. That is not too bad for this unit. Also, the built-in player is a plus. The Stagepas 500 that I have does not have that and I have to hook it up to a separate sound source for that. All in all, it looks pretty good.

I bought this RDL TX-J2  yesterday from a person on Carousell. He was selling it at a very good price and I just could not pass it up. In case you are wondering what the TX-J2 is, it is an unbalanced input transformer designed to sum two unbalanced input signals to a balanced mono output. It features two gold-plated RCA coaxial input jacks and one mono output via a terminal block. It’s passive design means that no power source is required.

When I got got home, I hooked this up to a spare XLR cable I had and tested it on my trusty Stagepas 500 system.  I connected an old Samsung J3 mobile phone to the TX-J2 via the RCA port and connected the XLR cable to one of the XLR inputs on the Stagepas. I then proceeded to play a few jazz songs on Spotify. Let me tell you this…the sound from this was perfect. The input was much hotter and clearer than my SM Pro DJDI. Only the Radial Pro D2 was able to rival it sound-wise.

This TX-J2 will be my new DI box for small gigs, from now on. It is small, perfect to use and sounds absolutely killer. True, it is mono, but some establishments have their speakers set up in such a way where the stereo sound-field is not noticed. I got a good deal for this I feel

I have a few of these connectors that I got off a construction site. These were used as temporary electrical connectors on the site until they were torn down when the site reached completion stage. They just dumped a whole lot of cable along with the connectors in a big dump and yours truly saved them. How I have a whole plastic container of these that I kept in my junk pile. These little connectors can handle 16A with no issues, and the connectors I found can handle cable cores of up to 2.5 mm. At the present moment, I am thinking of deploying them on the speaker cables of my Stagepas 500 sound system…so I can easily detach them or connect them when required. These are good electrical connectors to have in your toolbox.

As you all probably know, if you have been reading my blog that is, I have the Yamaha Stagepas 500 that I bought almost 10 years ago. It is still going strong and while I do admit that I have not been using it for any shows lately, I still love it. I was always hoping for an improvement to the Stagepas line and not long after I bought my Stagepas 500, Yamaha released the Stagepas 600i. After some years, I asked some Yamaha engineers and sales people in 2016 if there was going to be any new updates to the Stagepas line. They said that they were working on something and it should be out soon. That soon came some time back and this is what came out…the Yamaha Stagepas 1K

When I saw this Stagepas that Yamaha created, I was sick to the stomach. I do not know WHY people think that vertical line-arrays like these are the greatest things ever. According to Yamaha, this new Stagepas is a 1000W PA system with 5 channel mixer, 12” subwoofer, 1.5” x10 line array speaker, a Bluetooth input, SPX digital reverbs and 1knob EQ and multi band comp for master output. Features-wise this is what it has:

• 1000W (HF:190W+LF:810W) power output
• Biggest in the class 12” subwoofer for low frequency
• 1.5” x10 slim line array speaker for high frequency
• Digital mixer (3 mono mic/line + 1 stereo line)
• Multi band comp “mode” for master output
• 1-knob EQ for per channel
• High resolution SPX digital reverbs (4types, parameter control)
• 2x Hi-Z (high impedance) inputs
• Link out and monitor out
• Dedicated cover included
• Optional reverb foot switch
• Optional dolly for more portability

Like I said, I was very disappointed in this release by Yamaha. If Yamaha was releasing this to compete with the Electro-Voice Evolve series, let us just say that they made a big blunder. This thing has got no power and cannot “throw” the sound because it has no horns. Plus it is on the floor and cannot be suspended on stands like the previous iterations. No matter what, you just cannot beat physics. Yes Yamaha, I am disappointed with this release. Your Stagepas systems had so much going for them but this release of yours is just not making it. Bring back the traditional Stagepas please. This design sucks.

I took this picture outside Jurong Point. I did an event here years ago and this electrical outlet was used by me to power my sound-system. I was lucky that there was an electrical outlet like this at this shopping centre. Most of the time, whenever I used to do events, it was really hard to find reliable electrical outlets for my sound equipment. Sometimes, the outlet was so far away that I had to use quite a few metres of electrical cable to connect to that remote electrical point. It was difficult because I used to supply a small system and I travelled light. But not this place. This electrical outlet has CEE Form sockets should you need to utilise a 3-phase power connection. Me? I just hooked it up to that 13A socket with the isolator switch and that worked just fine