Speaker Rigging
Most PA loudspeakers are not designed or built for overhead mounting. Those speakers you bought at the music store and use with your band? They work really well sitting on the floor. If they have the requisite cup, they’re good on a pole stand, but you have to be aware of the high centre-of-mass and make sure that the legs of the stand are spread out far enough that an accidental bump won’t topple the whole assembly. If you hang them from a ceiling unfortunate things can happen, unless they happen to be specifically engineered to be mountable.
I recently read an old post on the Blue-Room technical forum by someone who climbed up a ladder to check an old speaker that wasn’t working, and he found that the loudspeaker cabinet had “come unstuck”. The top of the cabinet was securely fastened to the building structure with appropriate rigging, but the rest of the cabinet was secured to the top of the cabinet only by the carpet that was glued onto it as a rugged finish material. It is a scary thought that something like that was hanging over peoples heads for who-knows how long, and it could have fallen at any time.
Years ago I read a JBL tech note on Safe Suspension of Loudspeakers, and it give quite a bit of detail about particleboard construction being unsafe for “flying”. It is still available online from JBL in a poor-quality scan, and I make it a required reading for my students because it is one of the few sources of rigging information that is aimed at the novice rigger, good accurate information, readily available, and free.
Tags: free resources, Rigging
