If you're the type of person who likes to keep things simple, you might be attracted to products that do everything, or at least several things, all in one box.
Powered loudspeakers—also known as active or self-powered loudspeakers—provide a couple of major functions: not only do they reinforce, they're equipped with onboard amplification, eliminating the need for stand-alone amps, and the cable runs that apply to passive systems. But are powered loudspeakers really the simplest—best—choice for your church? As with everything tech, it depends.
Very often, how effective powered loudspeakers are is relative to the space, notes Chris Rayburn, founder and CEO of Summit Integrated Systems, a design and installation firm based in Lafayette, Colo. “[Powered loudspeakers] are great in situations where dedicated cooling for amplifiers is not available,” he says. Powered speakers are also a good bet if your facility doesn't have the real estate for a rack full of amps. Cabling also comes into play: “If the distance between amp racks and the speakers is too great, the signal loss due to cable length can become a problem, [and] powered speakers are a good choice in situations like that.”
Up Side
One big advantage powered loudspeakers offer is portability: with them, you no longer have to schlep amps around, and they decrease set-up time. “When it comes to setting a room up—maybe a room for a youth band, [for example] —you can drop in powered speakers and powered subs and have it sounding pretty good in a nice, clean package,” says Jeff German, business development director at Live! Technologies, an event production and AV installation firm based in Columbus, Ohio. “That's a big win for churches.”
One big advantage powered loudspeakers offer is portability: with them, you no longer have to schlep amps around, and they decrease set-up time.
It's especially a big win for portable churches, who are faced with the tight time constraints that apply to loading in and out of their meeting spaces every week, notes Live! Technologies founder, Dave Meade. Powered loudspeakers also come in handy for spontaneous events: “They may have a fixed sound system in their sanctuary but they hold a lot of events, which portable speakers work well for,” like an Easter egg hunt, for example, outside on the grounds or small concerts held in shopping malls. “It comes in real handy to be able to run out and do that.”
Because powered loudspeakers simplify set-up, they're friendlier to less tech-savvy users, and therefore more suited to volunteers who may be learning the ropes when it comes to audio. “It's quite a bit more complicated to set up a non-powered system with amps and cable runs and snakes than it is a powered system, which is really a couple of plug-ins,” German says. Teaching someone how to plug something in is, hopefully, not that difficult a task.
Down side
One major drawback of powered loudspeakers is that because they handle both sound reinforcement and amplification in one box, repair and maintenance can be cumbersome, especially if the speakers are flown. “This is a very personal opinion, but I don't want active electronics in the air that I can't service if, in the middle of something, they should go down,” German says. “I want to be able to pull an amp out of a rack and stick it back in, or I already have an amp in a rack, and we just have to switch out some cables really quick and we're back up and running.” Also, he adds, powered loudspeakers are heavier, making retrieval from a flown position more difficult.
“[With powered loudspeakers] we find more issues over time with amplifiers than with speaker components,” Rayburn says. Once again, when the amp is in the air, it's much more difficult to service, especially during or in between services. “When you have a dead amp channel in a rack, and you have a tech-savvy person on site, we can walk them through solving that problem over the phone and have you back up and running in short order. If that dead amp is in the air above the stage, it becomes a much more difficult problem.”
Speaking of being in the air, because they are heavier, flying powered loudspeakers requires some extra attention to rigging, underlines Jeff McLeod, managing director of Church Audio Video, a design and installation firm based in Grand Prairie, Texas. He notes that this is a paramount consideration in any case, but an issue that churches that are handling the installation themselves should be very conscious of. “You don't want to [install it yourself] if you don't have someone who really understands weight loads,” he says. The last thing a church wants is a loudspeaker falling from the ceiling—especially if it's when the space is occupied.
There are also discrepancies in how easy powered loudspeakers are to fix, and this depends largely on who manufactures them. “I've found that in my experience on the live event side that some are really expensive or tough to repair and service once they're down,” German notes, adding that he's seen this most in the prosumer portion of the category. “At some point, it's cheaper to replace than it is to repair, and I don't know if I would have that same argument with the non-powered systems. Outside of drivers going down, a [standalone] amp is pretty easily repairable vs. an onboard amp in some of the powered speakers.”
All things being equal …
Still, powered loudspeakers offer churches a viable sound reinforcement solution—one that, if they need to, they can implement themselves. “The DSP—the digital signal processing to time align the components and to equalize them properly—generally are already done inside the box for you, and you don't need someone who is a professional loudspeaker system designer to be able to do that work,” McLeod says. “So if you're the end user, powered loudspeakers can be a great solution because you don't have to know a whole lot about loudspeaker design and hooking them up. You can just plug in a cable and you're ready to go.”
