Suhr Reactive Load IR assistance

  • Thread starter Thread starter Manxmusicman
  • Start date Start date
M

Manxmusicman

Active member
Evening amigos,

As a new newbie in the world of ir’s I’m looking for some help. I play in cover bands, mostly in small pubs that are getting very touchy about stage volume. I play through either a carol Ann od3r or a carol Ann triptik depending on the band and always through a carol Ann 1x12 cab loaded with an evm12l. Everything is mic’d up in my bands and I use iems to keep the volume down and to protect my hearing. I’ve got the point where I love the sound of my ca’s through my iems.

Recently I’ve been thinking that since I don’t run the amps loud I could ditch the cab and go down the ir route directly from the amp head into the pa and use my iems to monitor. This led me to purchase the reactive load ir.

It arrived today and unfortunately so far I’m very underwhelmed. I’m plugging the heads into the reactive load and using the headphone out with Audio technica athm50x’s. The sound is fizzy, undefined and makes my ca’s sound like a crap metal tone when that’s not what they’re about at all, I’m not a metal player but the amps sound like they’ve got way to much gain and when you turn it down single notes loose all their drive. Also the od3r is a lovely thick sounding amp but through the ir it sounds thin and again fizzy. So to my questions:

1) Am I simply expecting too much from this setup? My understanding is that I would be able to get my amps tone but what I’m hearing is definitely not what my amps sound like
2) Could it be the celestion ir’s just don’t suit my ca’s? The evm12l is specifically recommended for my amps
3) Where is the best place to get a couple of decent free ir’s to test out and see if I can get closer to what I’m used to.

I really want to make this setup work and I don’t mind investing into third party ir’s but if I can’t get it to improve then it will be returned. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks, Phil.
 
Last night I tried my Suhr pro and fender strat start into my amp which then went into the RL and then head phone out. I also tried my pedal board with the amp and I was able to get some pretty decent clean tones and low gain tones but anything with gain on just went a bit fizzy. I’ve never used anything but my evm12l cab with the ca’s so I don’t know if that’s what they would actually sound like or not. Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out.
 
In my experience, using IRs to headphones sounds really dry/fizzy without adding some type of reverb or delay to replicate a room. Do you have some type of effects that you can add? Or some small monitors or speakers? Even using actual speakers gives your ears a bit of real room reflections to fill out the sound IME.
 
John Suhr posts on the gear page. You may want to start a thread over there and he is likely to respond.
 
Thanks for your help guys. I’ve had much more these evening, turns out that something isn’t quite right between the audio technica’s and the reactive load as when I’ve tried my iems on it I get the kind of sounds I as hoping for, however started playing round with the third party irs and just getting to a point where I was happy when the display stops working! We’ll see what Suhr come back with.
 
I had the same problem with the SRLIR I contacted them and they sent a new unit ( excellent customer service ) I eventually went with a V1 Reactive load and the new Two Notes CabM .
 
I took my Fargen up to my church gig and went direct to the board....IR 4.3 was the ticket and it sounded amazing!

I haven't tried my Tucana through it yet or bothered with headphones..... I have some Celestion IRs and they seemed a little brighter but as some mentioned, headphones would be the last resort for monitoring your tone.

If you are recording and your playback is crap....thats a different can of worms.

Sure hope you get it sorted out :thumbsup:
 
4.3 and 3.2 were my first choices but the red wirez evm12l ir mentioned above blows them away. The celestions seem to have a scooped sound compared to the full, smoother tone of the evm. Annoyingly I was just trying the ownhammer evm when the srlir ran into problems with the display. Hopefully I’ll get a response from Suhr soon.

I know what is being said about using speakers but it’s my iems that I’ll be listening to so they have to sound good to me through them first before I starting tweaking the pa.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top