This has gotten a little old but I haven't visited in a while. In case you have questions stil...

We used to use an old osciloscope and some test tone CD’s. I suppose the test tones could be ripped to MP3 for the empeg… This was in the old days when you had a head deck, EQ, line driver, noise gate, and finally an amp. Seems these days it’s all built in…

Anyways, we’d set every gain on every piece all of the way down, and take the RC leads just before the amplifier and plug them into the o-scope with an adapter. Cue up the test tone CD to 1kHz and hit repeat (also 60Hz, and maybe some others depending on where the sub crossover was – early in the chain or built into the amp). Then start at the CD player and turn the volume up as far as it would go without clipping. Once it clipped we’d back off a notch and then go to the next item in the chain and do the same thing. Turn the gain on it up until we saw clipping and then back it off a notch. And so on.

Lastly we’d plug the amps back in, with the gains all the way down, and only turn up what was needed to make it sound balanced to your ears. Normally the front speakers got turned up a little in relation to the rears, and then the sub went up a little to finish it off. We ended up with the amps set low, all pieces within the chain set high, and the volume control on the CD player took it from there.

Usually it was loud enough in the end. If you wanted it louder, we’d set it by turning the CD player volume until it hit that clipping point / or all the way up (some would go 100% without clipping), then just “have at” the amp gains until it either made your ears hurt or you could hear the speakers distorting, whichever came first.

Of course you need to have an old o-scope from a science lab available… luckily we did when in school, which was the last time I did this. Since then it’s been deck –to-amp connections for me, and through reading or surfing I’ve seen that the head decks I’ve bought would go 100% without clipping anyways.

On the crossovers, what’s always worked for me was to set the fronts and rears at high pass at roughly 100Hz, and the sub low pass at the same spot, and do all of the gain settings. After that, we’d yank the RCA’s on say everything except the front speakers. Turn the volume up to about as high as you’d really ever listen to it, and then turn the crossover point down until you got distortion from the bass. Up it a little bit, and then do the same for just the rear speakers. Finally get everything plugged back in, and set the sub by ear. Almost always it got set for a low pass point just a little bit under where the fronts were set, and usually it was something like 75 / 80 Hz.

Of course there are other methods, but this always worked for me, my friends, and is very much what a lot of the IASCA people did at the time as well. However I can remember someone on this board, I don’t recall the name, but I think he had a Taurus SHO? He had completely different settings than anyone else I’ve ever heard of, but it seems to have worked great for him. In the end, it’s about what sounds best to yourself I guess. But hopefully that gives some ideas where to start.