Ed you are on to something. It looks like 1982 this was added.
The came from a touring PA company that Perry got them from. This circuit is able to Handel feed back so maybe was on some horns or something that was hard to control. The high frequency circuit here has no real use in a home system. The next one I do will have a different control board.
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That makes sense because these probably drove the flying S4 systems
"Modified Phase Linear 700 were used to drive the S4, so that is also consistent.
The S4 embodied the most off the shelf JBL components one could fit on the front baffle of a 45 x45 x 22.5 inch package, ideal for the 90 inch truck boxes of the time.
If you were on axis to one box the sound was that of a JBL studio monitor on steroids.
Unfortunately, they have lots of destructive interference patterns when arrayed.
As I recall, the S4 were normally run three way active, with a passive crossover between the 2440 (or 2441, 75 watts RMS) and the 2405 slot tweeters (10 watts RMS) at about 7000 HZ. IIRC, crossover points were 200 and 1200.
The 200 HZ cross point would be considered quite high for an 18” to 10” point now days, but was common back when S4s were ruling the concert world.
I am not positive of the 10 & 18” model numbers, but 75 watts RMS per 10 and 150 to 300 watt RMS power handling for the 18” would be typical for this era of drivers.
The system would have four cabinets per amp rack (block) 8x4 =32 S4.
Having 8 racks allows for flexibility of splitting the system into 4 or even 8 smaller systems, and allows for turning down the down front cabinets.
Henry Cohen gives the amp assignment in the next post.
The S4 embodied the most off the shelf JBL components one could fit on the front baffle of a 45 x45 x 22.5 inch package, ideal for the 90 inch truck boxes of the time.
The S4 is an odd duck for dispersion. Flown in a vertical hang, the 10” will work like a line array, but the hi mid 2343 exponential oval horn has a narrow 30 degree horizontal dispersion, and wider 60 degree vertical dispersion, which is somewhat narrowed by the vertical orientation of the two horns. The 2405 (20 watt pink noise) slot tweeters have very wide 140 horizontal dispersion and 40 degree vertical dispersion.
Because of the narrow hi mid horizontal dispersion, a 32 box system would typically be deployed 6 cabinets (three bumpers) wide, the inside 4 three deep and the outside two 2 deep. The bottom row of cabinets would be angled down until they “tipped” forward, the back of the bottom cabinet hitting towards the front bottom of the cabinet above. The rigging strap had a swivel that would allow the angle. This arrangement resulted in the front of the bottom cabinet not following a proper arc. All seats of an arena would be covered (with massive comb filtering).
The 440 pound cabinets required lots of chain motors. Clair's “bumpers” were a good design for the S4, and allowed for in the air aiming when using two motors between bumpers.
In latter years the S4 used a proprietary mid horn and new rigging that addressed some of the aforementioned problems. I don’t know the exact time of the changes, but I’d guess the corner rigging, the lighter weight back panel and the horn change were all done around the same time, though with touring commitments, probably were done over a fairly long period of time.
There are (and were) many cabinets with more consistent array coverage than the S4s, but they did about half of all the arena shows for well over a decade.
I often have wondered where around 1000 S4s (between Clair and A.A.- 4000 JBL components) ended up, other than the ones that found their way back into Clair’s other cabinets and into the crusher"
I am sure Clair used the D-500s in the same capacity as the 700s