Proper Sound Hardware Cabling

Hello All,
My RME Fireface 800 is finally on it's way and I am looking for suggestions insofar as speaker connections are concerned. I will be using 2 - mackie srm 450's, 1 mackie - SWA 1501 sub, and 4QSC - K8 speakers. All of these units have built in amps. My primary concern is finding the best way to connect the sub woofer - my old set up - I ran the xlr cables into the sub and passing the signal thru to the srm 450's, with the fireface unit, is it best to use separate jacks for all of the speaker connections?

Thanks
Steve E.

Hi Steve,

Sounds like some nice hardware. If it were me I'd keep the pedal ranks routed though the sub and then on to the mackie 450s. That way you take advantage of the mackie's built in crossover filters. They presumably went to a lot of trouble engineering a smooth tranisition from the sub to the 450s and it is not all that simple to set up the right filters in the RME to do the same job as well as Mackie has done. Plus it's easy to forget and route a pedal reed to the sub only and loose all the upper harmonics. Not to mention that you will also want to maintain any stereo "air" or spacial sense that the sample set may have captured for these voices. This is all possible with seperate outputs from the RME, but I'd keep the basic sub/speaker transition simple (daisy-chained) and save the complexity for how you handle the remaining 4 or more speakers.

But honestly, I'd probably end up trying several approaches to see what "felt right". I've recently dropped my side "reverb" speakers to give me an additional front pair for some of the lighter reed voices. At the moment I'm running three stereo pairs all in front, a percussion speaker for theater organ fun, and a sub.

Thanks for the response and insight - I'll probably do just that - keep it simple.