How to set your power amp. DJ advise.

0:00 This video is all about how to set your power amplifier

Alright folks, this video is all about how to set your power amplifier. It's got nothing to do with speakers, it's just about setting the power amplifier. Right, first of all, the first picture, we've got a couple of boxes there. Now this, in a sense, is just to show you what to look out for. When you actually buy a power amplifier, don't go for the power amplifiers that look good on the outside. In other words, they've got loads of flashing lights, 90% of power amplifiers will have LEDs on them anyway, but some of them are different colours, fantastic writing on the front in all shapes and sizes, loads of buttons. In other words, basically what they're trying to say to you is, look guys, I look good on the outside, but I'm probably crap on the inside. As opposed to a power amplifier something like this, where you've just got two volume controls, gain controls they're sometimes called.

0:59 This guy here, let's imagine

You've got a few LEDs and you've got an on-off button. That is it. Quite often they will be the better ones to look for. Secondly now, if we look at this guy here, let's imagine now that one of the volume controls on our particular amplifier is a door. Now imagine we've got this one here, this is one side and there's another one but we're just going to look at one side. Now just imagine now that the mixer is turned on But the amplifier is down. So if you imagine we've got a knock-knock here, but because the door's closed, we're classing now as the volume control as a door. Because the door is closed, no sound is going to come through. Nothing's going to come through that door. So in other words, mixer is up, sound is playing through the mixer, the signal is going from the mixer into the amplifier,

2:26 To you when you're setting your

The speakers. Now let's look at this guy here. Let's imagine the mixer is on full, but the door, the volume control, is only half open. Now what's happening is all this sound here, which are sheep, are trying to get through, but only a tiny amount is actually getting through because it's getting squashed because the actual gain control is only halfway open. Now let's look at this guy here. Alright. What we've got now, we've got the mixer near enough in exactly the same position. We've now got the door, the gain control, maybe 190-80% open. The beauty about it now is all of this sound can come out with ease. Okay, the reason for this video is basically to explain to you when you're setting your actual power amplifier, it's a good idea to have the gain controls quite high because then what's happening is when you

Push your mixer higher, the sound will be able to travel through the amplifier with greater ease as opposed to thinking right. If I turn the amplifier down, I'm not going to get so much sound out because all that's happening is all of this sound from the mixer is trying to get through the door and it's being compressed. So what happens is your amplifier won't be able to work efficiently. So I hope I get that sorted. Thank you for watching and as usual, practice and enjoy.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.