DS> Actually what I described was from a booklet from Apogee called sound
 DS> reinforcement for worship, written by the Director of education and
 DS> senior systems engineer of Apogee, Patrick Price.
In other words, some oversimplified sales literature to comfort people trying 
to have incompetent volunteers pretend to be able to handle things they 
should contract out....  
 DS> The point you should be concerned with is that if you use an assortment
 DS> of power amps in your system, and your high frequencies are amplified
 DS> by a factor of 40X, your mids are amplified by a factor of 45X, and
 DS> your lows are amplified by a factor of 35X, The high/mid/low balance
 DS> through the speakers will be severely messed up.
Some parts of what you quoted aren't too far off as simple explanations.  The 
above seems to be the heart of the instructions, and is quite simply wrong.  
 DS> To properly calibrate a sytem using amps with different gains you must
 DS> use the gain controls on the amps to match their output levels (given
 DS> the same input) to that of the amp(s) with the lowest specified gain.
 DS> Start by putting a 0.5 volt 1kHz sine wave signal into each amp (no
 DS> speakers connected), and use an AC volt meter to measure the output
 DS> Now go through the remaining amps once again using the same 0.5 volt
 DS> input signal and adjust their gain controls so that the output voltage
 DS> matches that of the reference amp.
 DS> I attempted to say the same thing in less words in my original post, so
 DS> the question remains is the above valid or hype? I can't see how not
 DS> including the speaker efficiencies in the overall balance makes sense.
You're right; it's hype.  Bonnie's summary here was much more realistic.  
What they suggest, though leaving speakers connected, could be valid for full 
range cabinets closely located or covering different areas with similar 
system gain needs, and with similar cabinet ratings.  Those are unrealistic 
assumptions.  
The implied 3 way system makes that idea utterly absurd.  It is interesting 
to note that they likely suggest tests with speakers disconnected to avoid 
being blamed for destroying garbage better taken direct to the dumpster as 
found in many churches, while suggesting a procedure ripe for toasting 
mid/high compression drivers.  It's also interesting to note how they fail to 
mention what would happen if you feed their 1 KHz tone to the amps via an 
electronic crossover.  
Dare I mention architectural acoustics, and differences between music 
fidelity and speech intelligibility?  
Terry
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