Danley SH-LPM Floor Monitor: can an industry standard, stage monitor give Hi-End performance at home?

... reportedly... YES!

Just read the following:

Danley Sound Labs gave me a few products for the Road Test, one of them being the SH-LPM Floor Monitor.

Let me start by saying........WOW!

Lets look at the specs. The box is about 13.5 X 21.5X18" It weighs in at 41 pounds, not too heavy for a single person to move easily around the stage, or into a case.

The box is stated at 60Hz - 20 kHz =/- 3 dB. It uses an 8" COAX (Yes you read that correct, I said 8") mounted on a horn. Its rated at 300 watts continuous and 600 program. It is passive and has a built in x-over. The box features 2 Speakon NL4s on each side hidden inside the handle for ins and outs.

It is covered with a nice textured Polyurea paint, and features a heavy grill, backed by a special fabric instead of foam. The folks at Danley tell me that it keeps the rain out, unlike ordinary foam that can soak up moisture.

Overall, it is one nice looking box. It has rounded corners, and everyone that used the box commented on how nice it looked. (and sounded!)

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e97/soundguyCraig/DanleyMon.jpg

Here is a pic of the side showing the connectors.

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e97/soundguyCraig/DanleyMonside.jpg

It not only looks nice, but it sounds GREAT! I am a big fan of coaxial speakers, especially wedges. For the kind of gigs I do (corporates, vocalists, jazz, country, bluegrass, acoustic, folk, world, etc) I think a coax is the perfect choice. They are usually smaller in size than a 2 or 3 way box, and they don't have that "horn honk" that a lot of boxes seem to have with a seperate horn, especially when you stand off to the side.

I'm also a big fan of passive wedges. I like being able to run a speaker off 1 side of an amp, and not having to run a separate power cable and signal cable to powered wedges.

First, I tried the box in the shop. I powered it up with a QSC RMX850 (my standard monitor amp). The boxes will take more power, but for the majority of gigs I do, an 850 is enough.

Right out of the box the speaker sounded great and I had plenty of volume. I played some music and used a mic and a sweep generator to test the box. Very impressive with no EQ. The box starts to lose low end at around 60Hz, but thats plenty low enough for me. I usually roll off the bottom end of my wedges between 80-100 anyway.

I took the grill off of one of the boxes so you can see the nice waveguide.

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e97/soundguyCraig/DanleyMonfront.jpg

I took the boxes out to a few gigs. The first one was a corporate jazz band playing for a reception. Normally I would have used a few of my Ramsdell 10" Coax boxes on this type of gig, so this was a good comparison for me.

While the boxes are a bit bigger than my small 12" cube Ramsdells, they are not too big for a small gig like this. They look nice and clean, and even the event planner commented on how good they looked with the rounded corners.

I placed one box in front for the female singer, and used the other box as a sax/vocal wedge. The sax player commented on how nice and smooth his sax sounded. The female vocalist liked the wedge as well. She said she liked how "natural" her voice sounded in the wedge. To be honest, her voice might have sounded "natural" in the wedge, but that's because I did a ton of EQing to get her thin voice to sound full!

The sax guy was really tall, so the wedge angle seemed a bit low for him. No problem, as I carry some "Acoustic Aiming Devices" with me to every gig (blocks of wood painted black). A 2X4 positioned under the wedge gave me the angle I wanted.

I didn't use any EQ in the wedges, except I took a bit of one frequency out of the lead vocalists wedge because I was worried about feedback.

One thing I really liked about the box were the recessed connectors on each side.

The next day I used the wedges as backstage monitors for a general session. My wedges also have stand adapter so I can use them as delays, fills, etc and it gives me another mounting choice other than floor placement. The Danleys are dedicated wedges so I had to be creative. I put one on it's side on top of a roadcase and used it as a monitor for some clients backstage so they could hear the program.

I put the other wedge on the floor next to the wireless rack so the crew could hear what was happening onstage as they got the lav mics clipped to the presenters.

I also used the wedges at a small company event where I provided a system for a DJ after the presentation. The SH-LPM became the DJ's monitors.

Last week I did an arts education concert at a school. Different Broadway singers performed accompanied by a pianist. At the end, they performed a few songs together as a chorus. I placed one wedge at each downstage corner and used some Acoustic Aiming Devices to steepen the angle. Then I used them more as "sidefills" than wedges. I think I had 2 small cuts in the EQ for feedback control, not tone.



The Pros:
* Great sounding box
* Great looking box
* Speakons on both sides
* Water resistant material behind grill

The Cons:
* only 1 wedge angle (easily adjusted with Acoustic Aiming Devices)


Thanking Craig Leerman for his essay...


P.S. - Sure - IMO - much better is the Danley's Sinergy Horn...