Help! Anybody a genius of the PA? =)

[Homeoftheben]

A little off topic, but I thought I'd try out the board's sound board gurus (wherever they may be). I'm part of a smaller youth group (about 40 people, meeting in a rectangular room that seats about 120=80ft. x 50 ft.), and we really don't know too much in the way of sound. Those of us who play are all fairly decent musicians, however, so we bring some quality instruments to the table (i.e. my HH Sterling..shameless plug, I know). We've been playing through some Tannoys (I'd say maybe 14-15 inchers) and 2 x 18 inch subs (Peaveys) for a while now, running them out of 3 500 watt Peavey amps and 1200 watt SoundTech amp. We've never really liked the sound we get, so this past week we purchased a couple of Peavey 115's for about 350 bucks. Then comes the fun part. We disconnected the Tannoys, hooked the 115s to a 500 watt apiece, and then hooked both subs to the Soundtech. My question comes here- is there something we should buy/set that will help this setup? Should we have run something different, and are we in danger of possibly blowing anything? One of the guys mentioned crossovers- is that something worth buying at a much higher quality, or would the cheaper ones on Ebay be alright for that?

As a second option, we've recently priced a pair of Tapco Thumpers 15's for about 500 bucks, which would also be in our price range (barely). Would these (powered) be a better option for this kind of system? Would this bypass the amps completely?

Thanks for any help/direction you guys can give me! Like I said, we really are just shooting in the dark here =)

Ben

Oh- instrumental setup is as follows:
3 vocals
Acoustic
SM57 on a Marshall 100 watt
Sterling
Caged drum, pieces mic'd with an overhead

Thanks again!

 

[adouglas]

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