Commercial audio is a tightly-contested space with integrators spoilt for choice. Stephen Dawson looks at a successful product from Redback to see how it compares.

If you need a lot of speakers to fill a venue, shopping centre or whatever, you’ll need speakers which support a 100V feed. But perhaps you have a café in which a couple of speakers will do the job, driven by a lower cost regular amplifier. Redback offers a solution to both situations in the form of the High Power 60W IP56 100V White PA Speakers.

What are they?

As the name indicates, these are installation speakers which work in indoor and (reasonable) outdoor settings. They are indeed “high power”, with a rating of up to 100W (on the specifications) or 200W (printed on the back panel). They work both regular power amplifier outputs and also 100V line outputs. They don’t provide for 70V – which is more commonly used in the United States – but with a simple conversion you can use the same settings. Fifteen watts, 30W and 60W are the marked settings. That’s close enough to 7.5W, 15W and 30W for a 70V feed.

The speaker terminals are screw connections which require a flat or Philips head screwdriver, while the taps are selected using a recessed rotary switch, which also requires a flat head screwdriver. In addition to the three high voltage taps, there is a setting for 8Ω operation and another for off.

Initially I found this five-position switch a touch inconvenient, but then it struck me that this is actually a good design choice, keeping the impedance setting much safer than with a finger-adjustable knob. A wrong setting can easily cause damage to an installation, so improved safety at the cost of a little inconvenience is a good idea, especially since in most cases this will be set once and never touched again.

The speaker connections and tap/impedance controller are within a rectangular inset at the rear of the speaker. Next to each of the speaker inputs is a loop out for daisy-chaining more speakers. Supplied with the speaker is a square screw-on hatch, with a rubbery seal. This covers that inset. The hatch has a well-sealed clamp for a flexible pipe or tube – around 9-10mm – through which the speaker cable can be fed (you supply the pipe). A punch-through section is provided in case you want to use the loop out, along with an additional clamp for fitting to the hole.

The reason for the seals is that the speaker is IP56 rated. IP is “ingress protection”. The ‘5’ is the level of protection from dust, the second highest. It means “ingress of dust is not entirely prevented, but it must not enter in sufficient quantity to interfere with the safe operation of the equipment”. The ‘6’ is for water protection, and means that it will withstand “powerful water jets”: “Water projected in powerful jets (12.5mm) against the enclosure from any direction shall have no harmful effects.”

In other words, it’s fine for outdoor use and rain should present no problem. Just don’t toss it in the swimming pool (immersion safety requires IPx7 or IPx8).

Inside, the speaker is fitted with a 135mm long-throw driver and a 25mm tweeter. I initially assumed that, given that it was decently waterproof, the enclosure would be sealed. But I was having trouble reconciling that with the reasonably compact nature of the enclosure and the relatively high claimed sensitivity of 88dB (1W, 1m). Sealed enclosures tend to be low in sensitivity.

Rather than running with the assumption, I whipped off the front grille, which is secured with six screws. That grille is a very sturdy metal which should resist all but the most extreme blows. It turned out that inside there are two small bass reflex ports. I put some bass-heavy music on and cranked it to check. There was plenty of in-and-out air activity happening in the ports. Poking a finger in, they seemed to have some turns to help with water rejection. In addition, there were a few millimetres of course foam firmly affixed to the rear of the grille upon which any strong jet of water would break up, losing its projective power.

Bass reflex allows a higher efficiency than a sealed enclosure. And the tweeter was quite deeply mounted within a horn-shaped recess, which also adds some efficiency.

The whole construction of the speaker was sturdy, not just the grilles. The enclosure appeared to be made from ABS, with thick walls. It comes with an easily removable – and very sturdy – metal mount which is screwed to the top and bottom of the speaker, and upon which it can swivel quite widely. In addition, there are a couple of mounting points on the back for your choice of mount, and on the bottom a couple of ridges allow the speaker, sans mount, to stand securely upright.

The speaker I reviewed was white, but there’s also a black version.

In use

I would have liked a couple of speakers for testing. I mostly estimate sound by listening to well-worn tracks in stereo, and stereo sounds much, much better than mono. But it turns out that this speaker has been such a success for Altronics that it had only one unit in the whole nation for this test. Don’t worry, more are coming.

For most of my testing I still used music, but via two means. First, I rigged up a cable to convert stereo music from Spotify, using a WiiM streamer, to mono, and fed that via a pre-amp to a 100W high fidelity power amplifier, with one channel driving the Redback speaker. Obviously, I had the speaker switched to the 8Ω load setting.

And I have to say, the sound was really good, especially for the intended purpose of these speakers. This kind of speaker can easily sound tinny, due to high frequency peaks and an absence of bass. But with music, the sound was reasonably balanced, with a strong midrange and a proportionate level of treble. It’s the kind of sound that works well with background, and more-than-background, music. I wound up the volume level quite high – not to the claimed 112dB peak claimed, but to quite pounding levels, and the speaker maintained its composure and tonal balance, without a marked increase in distortion.

For moderate levels of music throughout a venue, no problems. For high levels on a dance floor, or such, I’d say again, no problem. Except I’d add a subwoofer in that situation.

For the music, I initially placed the speaker kind of unartfully, well into my room, well clear of any room boundaries. So, it got pretty much no bass reinforcement. Nonetheless, it produced a decent, balanced upper bass and much of the mid-bass, particularly at higher levels, to give a good sense of what lay below, but wasn’t delivered. So, in musically important installations, a sub wouldn’t go astray.

After a while, I pushed the speaker back hard against a wall, and then into a corner. That pushed up the bass – and the general loudness to some extent – of the speaker without noticeably muddying it or spoiling the balance. The Redback speakers would be ideally placed in the wall-ceiling fold of a room. But they work pretty well anywhere.

Following that, I got my hands on a mono public address amplifier with 100V line support and 60W capacity. Coincidentally, it also was a Redback brand model, but one that was about twenty years old. I switched the switch on the speaker to the 60W position and wired it to the appropriate terminals. The WiiM streamer output was converted to mono by the amplifier. The speaker still sounded fairly impressive. The only real difference was the treble was just a touch softer, but really not by very much at all.

I also took the speaker outside – a fully open area, with no boundaries nearby apart from the ground – and powered it with the Redback amplifier, but this time I plugged a Shure SM58 microphone into the amp. A couple of confederates, male and female, made announcements for me. The results were clear and coherent even at very advanced levels and a hundred metres or more of distance. Using the microphone inside a room was also quite effective, with good resistance to feedback (so long as I made proper use of the SM58’s cardioid pickup pattern).

Finally, I daisy-chained another couple of different-brand 100V speakers, with all three set to 15W to avoid overloading the amp. The Redback speaker dominated proceedings with its considerably higher sensitivity, and even at the lower wattage achieved impressive levels.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. The Redback High Power 60W speaker is versatile and should work nicely in venues requiring just a couple of speakers, or dozens. If music at good levels is intended as a primary function, then some subwoofers might be useful. Otherwise, clean vocals and decent music is easily achieved with these speakers.

Manufacturer: Redback

Distributed by: Altronics