I just used a KS212C for a live gig in a mid-size club where my band has worked regularly for years. The club doesn’t really have a good place for a subwoofer other than down center in front of the stage so that’s where it went. A pair of K12.2s are the top boxes. I played my regular test tracks to get the rig balanced and was very pleased with what I was hearing. But the real test is how it sounds with live kick and bass. The kick drum was very impressive. Solid, tight and punchy. The bass guitar was musical and nicely articulated. So now there are three questions to answer – does the cardioid function work as claimed, does it matter and does the box have enough output.
The answer to all three is a big yes. Just play a track with some low end and walk around the sub. The low-end on the back side just goes away. Does it matter? It sure does. I noticed a couple of things. In this club, the kick-drum mic is only about 6 feet behind the subwoofer. With a regular sub, the sound is going to wrap around and bleed back into the kick mic – not enough to be a feedback problem but enough to cause some phase issues. Without this energy hitting the kick mic, it seems that the kick drum was just better behaved and tighter. The second thing I noticed is that it was easier to get stage monitors working well because there’s less low-end to mask the things we want to hear. I can think of a lot of places I’ve played where bass build-up on the stage made monitoring a huge problem. As for acoustic output – my band is a seven-piece blues band with horns and a fully mic’ed drum kit. In this mid-size venue, the single sub gave me all the output I needed and showed no signs of running out of gas.
One unusual thing – I’ve been playing and doing live sound for a long time. This gig was the first time I actually had multiple members of the audience comment – favorably – on a subwoofer. All in all, this is an impressive sub that lets us bar-band musician/sound guys do what concert sound guys do to keep excessive low end off stage.