POD Pro/Speaker/Ohm/Watts Questions

[Executivos]

I kinda posted a thread about this before I got all the equipment, and so I never really got a clear answer....Now I have the equipment and exact specs.

I have a pod pro, an alesis ra 100 (100 watts per channel at 4 ohms, and 75 watts at 8 ohms) And a crate 4x12 cabinet...The important thing to note is that the cab is stereo. It has 2 seperate jacks..1 for the 2 left speakers and 2 right speakers.

I'm now looking to start playing live and I'd like to use a rack case pod setup. I'm concerned about powering it. My 4x12 cab says the stereo inputs are 40 watts each at 8 ohms rms? If my amp is sending 75 watts per channel and my cab is rated at 40 watts per channel, is that enough or too much?

I have tested it before at loud volumes and it sounds great, I'm just concerned to turn it up for a long time, as I don't want to damage anything. Please help!

 

[toyL]

because your ra100 amp is connected to 8 ohms of resistance per channel, it has the potential to send 75 watts of output "power" to each channel--if you crank it up to ten...this is straight forward vol. because your ra 100 has no pre-gain circuitry...in theory, setting the left and right vol. knobs to 5 will send about 37.5 watts left and right...so, as long as you "don't" crank the left and right vol. knobs past 5 you probably won't be sending any more than 37.5 watts of power to each channel...crank the knobs to 6 and you'll be sending about 45 watts per channel--this may be too much for your speakers to handle over any length of time...they may sound "killer" for a while, but, eventually the construction will break down...
I guess I'm too "old" to know what a pod is...would you please tell me?...I have an ra 150, but I use it to power my tannoy monitors, and have never considered this type of amp for powering guitar speakers...perhaps you could explain your signal-chain starting from your guitar...I'm intersted to know what all the talk is about...thanks.

 

[toyL]

assuming your "pod" outputs your guitar signal in stereo, I'm wondering why you would use a single cabinet?...if your guitar signal winds up in stereo, why don't you go ahead and separate the left and right by using separate left and right speaker cabs or amps?...having "stereo" in "one" cabinet would seem to defeat the purpose of having stereo...?...I'm sure the sound is rich and full, but not exactly as "stereo" as it could be...there are many processors out there that enable you to enhance stereo attributes (i.e. left/right/center delays), but, if your left and right are in the same cabinet, the effects are limited.

 

[charger]

If you're asking if you can blow your speakers, yes you can. There are 3 things you can do.

1. Never run your amp above a certain level, like halfway.

2. Replace the speakers in the cabinet. 40 watts seems kind of low for a 2x12, you could put in almost any guitar speakers and up that to 60, 80, 100, 150... check out Celestions. Just remember to add ohmage correctly... i always get confused about it, but I think you need two 16-ohm speakers wired in parallel to equal a 8-ohm load... but that could be series... oh hell i don't remember. look on celestion's website (www.celestion.com) and they'll tell you. they have a pretty good FAQ section for guitar speaker questons, and you can also e-mail your question and they'll respond.

3. Get a tube stereo power amp. It is much harder to blow speakers with a tube amp, I have heard that it is impossible, but I don't necessarily believe that. For example, you could get a used Carvin Tube 100 (50 watts/side). I have one and it's really good with the POD (but I wouldn't say great, there are much nicer and more expensive amps out there by Mesa Boogie, etc.). The added advantage of a tube power amp for guitar is that is sounds much better than solid state. All the tube amps I have ever played my POD through it sounded great, much better than it sounds direct or through headphones.

As an added note, if you're using your POD through a guitar rig, remember not only to switch the amp/direct switch to AMP, but also, turn off the speaker cabinet emulation for all of the presets you're using (turn cabinet emulation to "No Cab"). Otherwise, your sound will be terrible. What you want the POD to act like when you're running it into an amp and cabinet is the preamp section of the amp it's emulating. Guitar speakers naturally remove a lot of the high end that is present in a signal, and the emulated speakers do the same thing, so you end up with a really wrong guitar tone if you leave the cabinet emulation on.

 

[Executivos]

hey guys thanks for the replies. I have gone through the cabinet tuning and I understand all of the aspects of emulation. It sounds really great right now and that includes the fact that the speakers in it are probably quite terrible as my cab is a cheap crate cab.

As far as the stereo questions, keep a stereo image is not my concern. I'm using the stereo inputs to get more wattage. My amp doesn't work in bridged mode, so If i use the stereo imputs on my cab I think I get more power. I actually am getting somewhat of the "stereo image" as in delay effects. It's just not a very wide stereo image....The 2 left speaks of my cab play the left side and the right 2 speakers play the right side.

I really don't need a second cab. Too much stuff to carry around.

As far as what a pod is:

It's a guitar modelling preamp. Lots of companies make them, www.line6.com makes the pod. They have a regular version which is a little desktop thing and then the pro version (what I have) which is a rack mount system. Both of them sound the same, but the rackmount has some extra routing functions and digital outs which I use for recording. A lot of people love them, some people don't. I used to think tube amps were the only way to go, but I was proven wrong. If you haven't used one you should really try one out at a guitar store.


My signal chain is simply guitar into pod. pod into ra 100. ra-100 into speaker cabinet. I don't really use effects, but the pod has most of them built in (ie chorus, delays, verb, flanger, compression, tremolo, and rotary speaker)

I'm off to celestion.com thanks!