DJ Vintage

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Also, the Rockville (8 Ohm) and 2x Behringer (4 Ohm) combined on the amp will give impedance mismatch, a situation you don’t want.

The Rockville is the type of thing we warn people here not to buy. It’s total and utter (sorry to say) crap. For the price of a complete cabinet with damping material, passive crossover and a total of 6! drivers, including 2x 12″ costs about as much as one DIY Celestion 12″ driver. You can do the math. It can not and will not sound even halfway decent. It’s a nice thing for a kids bedroom and will look impressive at his/her birthday party in dad’s garage, but nobody that wants to be taken even remotely serious as a DJ should want to bring that piece of gear to any public performance.

So, taking the Rockville out of the equation, you could do the following, still employ most of your gear and get as close as is possible to achieving what you want.

1) Imagine a square or elongated “dance floor” in front of the DJ Booth.
2) Put the sub/qsc combo left or right of the DJ Booth to provide sound to those right in front of you. Best would be to get one extra qsc on a stand, so you can have tops on either side of the booth.
3) Put the EV’s on the near left and right corners. If you have a second qsc you CAN put the EV’s a bit further downfield aiming them towards the middle.
4) Put the Behringers on the far left and right corners. Here you can either choose to aim them back at the middle of the “dance floor” or aim them further downfield, depending on the area you want to cover. Beware that there can be an audible delay if you put them too far away.

It’s the only way I can see this mishmash of gear coming together in some sort of coordinated fashion.
But please leave the Rockville at home (frankly, just sell it off and get a second QSC for example).

In this setup, be sure to go to your sub first and connect everything else from the sub output (not the sub-through!). Since the amp has no through connectors, it needs to sit last in the chain.

Personally I’d work in pairs, the only exception being that you can get away with one sub(woofer) with two tops (full-range speakers) sometimes.

It really depends on what you want. Clearly you get more amplification if you add a sub, but it is amplification aimed at the very low frequencies (max. crossover is 140Hz for the 18 Mackie). Using a sub for those low frequencies will free up the same frequency range from the two tops (as they will receive their signal after the high-pass filter in the sub), so it has some amp power freed up to power the low-mids and mids. So the entire system will be louder as a whole.

That said, the main reason to go to a sub is to get a fuller and lower low frequency result out of your setup. So if you feel you are lacking low end and need more Umphhhh, then adding a sub is a good plan. If you are happy with the balance of your sound and don’t necessarily look for gut-shaking boom-boom, but more for louder and to cover a bigger area, then buying another pair of 15″s or 12″s would be a better option.

Hope that helps some.

As you stated, they are all potential pitfalls, and there isn’t much to do other than trial and error. The only one I know for sure will speed up your laptop in general is the SSD, but that won’t necessarily change your current problem, as most people that use Traktor without problems will most likely use it with a regular HD.

Apart from several problems with Traktor over some of the more recent releases (not affecting everyone I think, which makes it even worse), you say your latest Acer easily exceeds the minimum specs, yet Traktor states i5 (which you have) and 4GB (which you have). And you have gone from a 3.1GHz to a 2.2GHz cpu (assuming you are not overclocking, something I don’t suggest doing on a DJ laptop in the first place), losing quite a bit. Also with 4GB being the minimum, I’d always opt for 8GB. Two other things that CAN potentially influence performance are the HD (an SSD is the most surefire way to speed up your current laptop) and the presence/absence of a separate video card. DJ software, among other things, displays stuff like waveforms. While not the most demanding graphical labor, it IS continuously updated screen information. And if your laptop doesn’t have the option of off-loading that graphical chore but has to do it in it’s on-board video, it will take up both CPU power and memory.

Then there are i5 and i5 cpu’s, there are different chipsets handling all the other i/o and memory requirements and such. In short, just comparing two laptops on cpu/memory specs alone is not gonna tell you much about (expected) performance.

On a more general note:

If you want to bring sound to a large area, without a clear front/left/right setup (i.e. crowd can be anywhere, facing any direction), it pays to go mono. For this your mixer, controller and/or DJ software needs to be able to deliver a mono signal. Sometimes your sound card (if you use an external one) will have a stereo mono switch. At that point you only need 1 channel of output. If you are using balanced cables there is no need to have several source signals, you can just daisy-chain all your speakers.

The only exception here would be that you would want to go to any subwoofers first (provided they have built-in cross-over and a high-pass out connector) and from there daisy-chain all other speakers if you want only the sub to do the super low, otherwise just link the subwoofer anywhere in the chain, but be sure to use the “through” connector to get full range signal to any speakers further down the chain.

Can’t get the rental company to sponsor the fundraiser? 😀

You have two XDJ1000s?, what mixer?

And you are sending the identical stereo sound to all the outputs on the FR?

Can you set latency on the individual outputs?

At the end of the day you’d still be sending out a 2-channel (stereo), or in a public venue like a stadium even mono, so anything that has stereo out already suffices.

However I would personally NEVER use such a mishmash of speakers for a gig like you are describing.

Also you fail to tell us what else you are using. Controller? CDJ/DJM combo? Laptop only?

On the PA-side of things, if it’s a big gig they are paying for the PA. In that case I’d get the right gear from a rental company and get the rental company to give you some kind of discount (I get between 10 and 25% discount depending on what I rent) while charging list price to the customer. That way you get to make some money, you can have the rental company bring and collect the gear and set/hook it up and take it down. And you will get suitable, professional grade gear (with all due respect some of the gear you mentioned is way below par and some is hit/miss acceptable, the EVs are a good set of speakers, all imho) with a guarantee it all works.
Also, you can tell them what the field looks like, the kind of music/show, the amount of people that are expected and their dispersion and they will be able to advise you exactly as to what gear and what setup will work best.

All you would need to do is plug in either stereo or mono (mono would be my guess and choice) from whatever you are using (something we can’t answer yet due to a lack of information).

On a general note: for outdoor use you should calculate about 10 Watt RMS per person, provided they are relatively close to and centered around the speakers. RMS is something else than a lot of manufacturers write in their brochures! There they usually use terms like PPP (peak program power), pmp (peak music power) or other euphemisms to disguise the true RMS values. The 10W/person is based on an average sound pressure level. If you want really loud or extra heavy (sub)bass for example, this number could go up substantially.

Maybe not the answer you were looking for, but just my three cents as usual.