I spent a lot of time researching using this very informative forum before deciding to go out a buy a L1 mk1 with a B1 I liked very much the idea that we would not need to use monitoring on stage and that we would hear what the audience hears. i spent a lot of time on the feedback wiki. Hearing the quality of sound made me go out and buy a second unit off eBay with 2 B1s

Our band plays blues rock and consists of me on guitar , a vocalist and a loud! Drummer. We play with mainstage proving a backing track of bass and keys, the drummer plays to a click. We also use logic mainstage as our virtual mixer and latterly I have been impressed enough with MS to use it for guitar amp sims. So we have an entirely digital setup which is great for getting rid of heavy hardware and is the way to go for me being a software fan.

We did a lot of experimenting with the L1s and back line amps to get localised sounds and tbh it worked well enough to just put everything through the L1s with my guitar going through twin amp sims panned left and right giving me the best guitar tone I'd ever had! (For guitarists out there who can't get the tone from sims my tip is to combine amps that for me was the tone breakthrough)

Anyway during rehearsals we always suffer from the drummer being way to loud , we play in a small cellar and with low ceiling so we just set out the L1s with the top cylinder off. We just about manage to get the vocals loud enough above the drums to practice. So before the first gig with the new gear , I moved all the gear to a larger room so we could practice getting the sound right for the gig. I was really looking forward to hearing the L1s with both columns and in a larger room so we up the volume of the vocals and get a good mix.

I was disappointed. Naturally everyone said the bose should be moved in front of the mics like a conventional pa and I having done my research defended the bose philosophy and insisted they stay behind us. We tried everything, first of all everything lacked bass , I was putting them through the line input and trying to mix with MS gave that up and had better result going through the XLR input and using the eq on the remotes and using the trim. So this was the first digression from the manual. However we still couldn't get enough headroom without feedback, knocked all the reverb off backed off the treble etc and we ended up with a **** sound, in desperation we then then set up our old pa (jbl eons) which were much louder but provided us with an insight into how much clearer and musical the Bose were, we just couldn't accept that sound anymore, i was getting desperate even trying to locate some behinger feedback destroyers to deal with the problem so finally we tried the final option which was ' to hell with what Bose say move the speakers to the front and use the JBLs as foldback like a proper rock band'

To my relief and mild embarrassment that worked beautifully we could turn up the volume as loud as we like with no feedback and that's how we played the gig. the sound of the bose was great the only issue being the foldback , I'm now buying in ear monitoring!

Look if you've read this far well done , all I want to say is these are great sounding speakers but I'm confused as to why the classic Bose thing didn't work for me and if anyone would like to comment on what we are doing wrong or agree with me it would be great to hear from you. Cheers

-- thebluesvolcano, March 19 2011 --

full thread here