this thing is freakin awesome

When I built up my monitors for the home theater the first time, we lived across town in a fairly modern home with high, lofty vaulted ceilings and wonderful acoustics. I designed my mains for this large air space with 2-15” diameter, 4” Voicecoil drivers, a wonderful high/mid cluster at ear height with a 10” instrument speaker, an afterburner for the ultra highs, and a 1” exit horn for the highs. GREAT STUFF. The surrounds were all 12” coaxial drivers with horns and 10” instrument speakers for the mids. I won’t get into crossover points, damping, etc, but let’s just say that I’m both well-read and well-practiced on the subject and a student of the works of Jimmy B Lansing, Nelson Pass, and John Eargle. The Center and Sub were along similar scale. The center has 2-10” diameter instrument speakers and a 1” exit horn. The Sub has a pair of 15” bass drivers.
To further mitigate the pukes that are visualizing some teenie-weenie magical satellite box hanging on a #6 conical anchor in 3/8” drywall that ‘sounds great’ and ‘does everything’, let me say this: There are 14 voice coils in my home theater system that are over 2.9” diameter and 8 that are over 3.9” diameter. The whole array weighs more than my pickup truck. The efficiency is 99dB/W/m and the compression point is enough to make your head explode…..and that’s just where the nonlinearity starts! I designed, built and engineered this stuff from the best components available on earth.
So then, as time marched on we moved…..my home theater is now in a well finished basement with a layout that is acoustically imperfect compared to where everything was designed to go. A sub optimal bummer that pretty much sucked the wind out of my high spl sails. And that’s when a daydream lead me to your awesome box. I wanted a box that could run RTA, force equalization, setup crossover points for a bi-amped system (yup, time to eliminate that phase delay in the bass driver LPF and get it time aligned with the sub….). A limiter would be nice for when the kids get older and rock the volume knob a little hard…
And then I saw it. We were installing a Renkus Heinz array in a church with some SLS monitors for the sides. I knew we needed to pink the room…there was clearly some midrange deadspots…..and my buddy, whom I have now dubbed the best sound man on [my] earth opened up a DBX Drive Rack PA+. I told him of my home theater (and by comparison I had more stuff than the church…..). He handed it to me and suggested I give it a spin.
HOLY SHIT is that unit amazing. I’ll admit, I redid the +/-Vcc rails to the op amps. Having spent decades in the pro audio repair, design, optimization world, I don’t like linear regulator IC’s on their own. They are noisy and the op amps don’t reject that type of noise that well. I also redid the op amps with my own special sauce and stability tricks. This comes from decades of experience and tens of thousands of repairs and refurbs and redesigns that came in under the question “can you make this sound better?”. From a Dynaco PAT4 pre-amp that left with long tail diff pairs and polypropylene caps to countless pro audio and recording studio equipments….I know this subject well. Very well.
So, after a few minutes on the bench and some hotrodding with lead, HELL YEAH, LEAD solder, I put the unit online and set up a basic biamp. Surprisingly EXCELLENT performance from the DSP’s. I didn’t hear any clock jitter, roundoff errors, aliasing, or ‘digital muck’. Great noisefloor, awesome dynamic range, tight solid bass and even at the limits it stays together and sounds decent. I dragged in an O-scope and some earmuffs, found the clipping points and set up a nice limit….no compression though….sorry man, too many years compressing the snot out of the send-end of an FM transmitter to have the highs and lows sound pretty on a ½” voicecoil 6x9 on the back deck of a toyota….just can’t do it!! (don’t need it either….no live vocals….live drums, etc).
I then ran RTA with my standards, found some holes that my ears didn’t recognize in the lower midbass, then I ran the auto EQ with my old reference mic. AWESOME. I mean damned unbelievable. This low ceiling, straight cross section finished basement now sounds BETTER than what I had designed the equipment for one house ago.
I guess John Eargle and Jimmy B Lansing aren’t around anymore….and that’s a shame, but if I brought them into my home theater, I’m pretty sure I’d get a gleeful nod about halfway through supertramp ‘bloody well right’ or steppenwolf "magic carpet ride". After hotrodding the unit, installing it, and setting it up, I bought bill another one for the church. Probably should have done that up front, but you know how it is when you get into something. I never thought I’d say it to the ‘dsp geeks’ but THANKS DUDES! That drive rack is one hell of a box. I’ll be buying one for my system in the shop as well as my ‘lend out, party hard’ PA. I’ll say it again for emphasis….and I got the equipment , experience and skills to back it up…..That unit is AWESOME! Accept no substitutes ladies and gents.

Love It!

What a difference the dbx DriveRack PA+ has made in our sound!! I was amazed by the difference before and after the PA +. Easy and intuitive to use. Love the auto EQ and feedback suppression. Give it a try! You WILL NOT regret it!

Awesome sound

I use the dbx DriveRack PA+ with my "home theater". I have 2 600 watt Peavey speakers, 1 1600 watt Carvin sub, Peavey power amp, and Carvin power amp. The DriveRack PA+ makes the sound A+++. I am a hardcore audio person. I have a general setting that works well for almost any mix. But when I'm feeling like hearing perfection, I can make adjustments and save the setting for a particular DVD, Blue-ray, album, etc.
I use the limiter to prevent square waves from hitting the speakers at loud volumes.
A loudspeaker management system is key to getting the best out of your PA or Home Theater.

Brain in a box!

This product made a complicated process amazingly simple! It made an immediate, obvious, huge improvement in our sanctuary sound. Even the folks who constantly complain had good things to say.

Not for the amateur...but perhaps is should be?

This is truly an amazing unit that does EVERYTHING short of bringing you coffee. If manages EVERY ASPECT of the Front of House system!!! If you are using high end brand name products, it even has presets designed specifically for those speakers, amps, powered, unpowered, etc. The list is quite extensive. I brought this unit into a situation where the acoustice were the equivelent of a bomb shelter. I started with the Pink Noise and RTA mic, then just went from there folling the "atuo" settings to start and after all settings the unit had me run through were set up, I hoinestly did not have to change a thing and it "magically" made a HORRIBLE sounding room sound GREAT with the PA I had. THAT is why I give this unit such a high rating. If you run either permanent installed systems, or systems large or small that you set up inside at various venues, or outside. It even STORES those settings, so once you've run through a the set up for a venue, you can recall it anytime you come back!! Worth every penny!!!

Simply Amazing!

Wanting to eliminate all the outboarg gear I decided to give this a try on a friends recomondation. I am blown away at the tools this box box has to shape my bands sounds! the Auto EQ Is amazing, it works in seconds! The crossover is fantastic, it has delay, it has subharmonic synth, The kick drum sounds amazing and really punches you in the chest ! it has built in completely adjustable Compression and Limiters! Buy this and its all you need between your mixer and speakers! A load of Rack gear in one unit! its built very well and its all DBX Quality, Just buy this ans be done with it!

A rack unit you can't live without.

My first driverack and I purchased it on recommendations from the Sweetwater Forums. I cannot believe the difference in sound and it doesn't matter if your venue is a 100 person bar or a 500 person ballroom. The dbx Driverack PA+ is easy to set up and walk through and you can store your venues for future use. Even my biggest critic (my lovely wife) is stunned at the quality of the music now and she has been listening to us for four years. Why did it take me so long to find this product? Of course, the JBL SRX 715's and 718 Subs have a little something to do with it. :)

Great addition

A great addition to my setup, but not a fool-proof solution. The RTA & Auto-EQ functions will get you about 90% of the way, but you'll need to use your ear to fine tune the deal. Also, in highly reverberant rooms, it will tend to spike a few frequencies (i.e. the auto-eq will push a band all the way up, or all the way down) and you'll have to compensate for that manually. Otherwise I find that all the other functions work as advertised and I continue to use it nearly every show.

Piece of crap

I have been using this unit in my PA setup for years and it has let me down right in the middle of professional paying gigs many times only to embarrass me as an audio engineer and make it look like I can't do my job right. I contribute this to bad manufacturing. DBX probably makes these things for cheap and then sells them for big bucks. Totally lame.