BEST SPEAKER ON THE MARKET? | LD SYSTEMS MAUI 28 G3 REVIEW

This right here is the LD Systems Maui 28 G3 and G3 mix. And these speakers right here, let me show you guys. These are the most versatile and best speakers by far on the market, all around just literally the best speakers I think I've ever ran into. I'm in love with them. We own over 12 of them at this point. All right, so this is how these speakers are in their soft bags. We have the mixed one here. We have this red tape on them. We have two mixed units, and I'll talk about it later, but the tops are interchangeable. So you can use the top on the regular LD 28 Maui G3 or the mixed unit interchangeably. So we don't mark those, but we did mark the covers for our mixed units. That way we know where the mixed units are. And we'll talk more about the mixed unit as we go through the video. But let's just talk about these soft bags for a second. This is probably the one downside I would say to the LD series in general is their bags have not held up as great as I would like over the years. RCF makes way better bags than LD. And they are a little expensive, but it's about what you would expect from a lot of speaker manufacturers. These are as good as EV, JBL, something like that. But there's this back pouch on the back here that holds your power cable for the sub. Good power cable, but this rips over time. Like we've seen it with our speakers just in a couple of years. And the bag here for the top, it already has a rip coming through it already. But just to show you guys, it's pretty straightforward. There's a zipper. Their zippers aren't that great, but again, the bags are padded nicely. It's just the stitching, it breaks. So could use better stitching in the future. The tops are packaged like so. So you have both of your sticks and they have these nice foam caps. These are good that hold on to our sticks. So stick one does not have the LD logo and stick two does have the LD logo. Connections are all ported in here. All of this is metal. There is no plastic here, no plastic whatsoever. This whole bottom plate is a metal plate. Even this connector is metal itself. I think the connector on the inside is plastic in here, but this is all metal. This tab right here, that's metal. So it's not going to break. Metal pins, very nice construction. There is even handles on both sides here that if you wanted to hold it like this, you could. And there's handles on this one as well. But that is a little bit of that. There is a nice, wonderful made in China sticker, but honestly, this is really well made. This top here, this top is made out of composite and the sub cabinets are made out of birch. This is the regular one right here. Same thing, bag, you got these flaps to hold it and the power cable sits in the back. Another thing to mention, the bottoms here, they normally come with these right here. They're little covers that magnetically hold on. There's a little magnet here that it connects to. These also kind of fall apart. The magnets we found come out, like this is another one. I don't have the magnet anymore. So we just got rid of them all together. I don't think it's too big of a deal to leave this open, but just for reference out the box, they do come with that. Let's talk about what you're getting here with the MAUI 28. Like I said, this is by far my favorite speaker on the market. The LED system is MAUI 28 G3 is incredible for the bang for buck, what you're getting. And in general, the output of this speaker is the most versatile speaker I have came across. Not to mention it's a column, right? So it's clean, slick, and easily blends into any room. And it comes in white and black and you have the mix unit and the regular units. So it's super versatile and we'll get into the features of the mix as well. But let's look at what we got here. First off, we have a 12 inch woofer down below. Here in the middle, we have 12 3.5 inch Nino Denium driver, mid range, hot, mid to high range, varying speakers across here. And then up top, we have two high compression one inch drivers. In comparison, the bigger brother to this that you guys have seen me make a video on, the 44s, the only difference is that you have a 15 inch sub and you have four one inch drivers. So in general, this speaker is almost the same. It has the exact same mid range drivers that the 44 has. And it has just two less high drivers and a 12 inch. When we're talking about the actual drivers and the sound and what you're getting in the 28 versus the 44, you're getting damn near the same thing, just a little less bass, a little less highs, and a more compact form factor at a way better price. It's about half the price of what the 44 is, which is again why it came to be one of my favorite speakers. Build quality, metal grills on the front. These can get dented. We have dented a couple of them in pretty well, just from abuse of taking them to events. You know, we've got a lot of staff out here. Also from a power standpoint, this is a 1000 RMS speaker overall, 2000 watts peak. And if you look at the 44 bigger brother, it's a 1500 watt RMS at 3000 watt peak. So 1000 watt overall speaker, good specs across the board. LD has this thing called DYNNX DSP that's built into all of their Maui series. And basically it allows for the speaker to be pushed as hard as you want, and it will not distort. It purposely keeps the gains in check so that your speaker basically will not blow. And you also can push it as hard as you want, and it'll keep it clean and clear, and it won't sound incredibly distorted or sound way too high like, you know, some of the cheaper speakers out there. So I showed you a little bit of the top. Let's look at the sub bass here. So you got a handle on top, pretty easy to transport, and you also have two side handles on the side. And being a 12 inch bottom, it really makes it easy to transport. You know, you're not spreading your hands really wide around like an 18. 15s are also nice, but in general, this is the nice form factor of the LD28. Weight wise, overall it's 78 pounds. It's somewhere, I want to say these tops are like 5 to 10 pounds a piece. So you're looking at the base being somewhere around like 50 pounds. I'd have to look it up exactly, but it's a really nice form factor to be able to transport, and super easy for anybody to carry really. Before I get into the controls on the back of the speaker, I just want to take a second and talk about the sound. I already talked a little bit about it with the DSP features, but the sound output of this speaker is incredible. You guys have seen the 44 videos before. If you didn't see the Speaker Wars video we did, go check it out. This speaker sounds phenomenal. It is so clean, it sounds uniform and even throughout, and it's just, it's crystal clear on the highs. The mids are great, the lows are okay. It could use some more bass, especially in a DJ scenario, but we use these speakers all day long in our company for breakout rooms, side fills, back fills, and a lot of my DJs actually use these for events up to 120 people. I would not really push these speakers too hard, like 150 people is kind of the max I would say two of these could do, but in general, we use these speakers a lot. Across our company, we own 12 of these units. Two of the mixes, 10 regular ones, if that speaks for itself, and we bought all these with our own money. And being that the one thing that I think this thing needs more of is bass, one cool feature is you can actually couple these subs together. LD makes it so that you can actually run these in a cardioid configuration like this, or you can couple the bass units by themselves to add more bass. We did a corporate event that we do every single year now where we use four of these at the fashion show with a giant 100-foot runway, and we put four of these down the line, and it rocks. It sounds so damn good, and the bass coming from all four of those together is just so clean, and the speakers are so inconspicuous. But that's enough for kind of talking about that. Let's get into the controls on the back of the speaker. We're going to change up the camera angle, and I want to show you guys also the mix, because this is a full six-channel digital mixer with an app that you can control. It's got phantom power. The mix is insane, especially if you do corporate breakout sessions a lot. So this is the back of the LD Mali 28 G3 and our G3 mix. Obviously, mixer, no mixer. So we'll start with the regular one. You got Powercon down here on the bottom. Big, nice power switch, really satisfying to turn that switch on. Takes a second to boot up. Once all the lights turn off, we're good to go. So over here on the left, this is your main dial. On the right, this is your sub dial. So what you were actually just seeing there was I didn't have the top unit on it, so it defaults into cardioid mode to be able to use it with pairing it as a secondary sub. And then when you put the top on it, you now have your main knob here and your sub knob here. In general, we typically use this at 12 o'clock for both. Sometimes we might push it up to two or three. That's about universal for all of the Mali 28 and the 44s where I normally run them. The regular 28, we have basically one pair of XLR ins, one pair of XLR throughs, and then you have a sub out here that again you can use as just a coupling sub configuration or cardioid. And you get a little button here that you can switch it. Now you can see right here that this button shows off or cardioid. You can basically turn cardioid on by holding it. Now it's in the cardioid configuration. For you guys that don't realize, cardioid is the subs are facing opposite and basically the cardioid will cancel out the bass behind the speaker. So like if you have these up front and you have a lot of stage behind you and you want to cancel out the bass, you run a cardioid configuration and it helps push the bass out more. Or you can turn it off and it's got a nice little diagram that shows that both subs are facing the same way. Pretty cool that it's just built into the speaker. Now if I put my top back on over here, go back to our controls, you'll see this hold to link button right here. Pretty cool. You can actually bluetooth link your LD speakers together. So if you have two of the 28s, you can hold and link them together. You can also link mix units to regular units. There's a button for that as well on the mix unit as well. But pretty simple, clean controls on the 28G3. I'd like more inputs, but that's why they created the mix. So now let's go over to the mix and turn it on and show you guys what we got. Alright, so now we move on to the MAUI 28G3 mix unit with a complete digital mixer. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it on and I'm going to say, just tell you guys, this is a full on six channel digital mixer. You have everything you could ever want in a digital mixer and if not only six channels. There's actually a cat ethernet out here that you can link two of these together and create a 12 channel digital mixer. You can literally have like if you were doing a band, you can have one of these on both sides, link them together with a cat six cable and you literally have six inputs on both sides of the stage for your band for a full 12 channel digital mixer. And you have all the controls you could ever want inside the app, which that's the other part. It has an app. So if you guys saw when it first turned on, there was actually a QR code. And if you scan the QR code, it's going to take you to the app store to download MAUI mix, which is this app right here that allows you to basically control your MAUI 28G3 mixes. If I want to control this speaker, I'm going to click the hold to link and it's going to bring up a menu here. You can either pair for streaming so you can stream Bluetooth content to it, you know, like wireless, Spotify, all that. Or you can click this hold the on the control and now it's in pairing mode. And now on my phone, I can select that speaker and we're going to take a second. It's going to authenticate the pair and we are good to go. So everything you can do on the back of the speaker can be controlled through the app. And like I said, you have a full control digital mixer. So you have your inputs here. Input one, you can click into that input. You can select from a variety of things, whether it's in stereo or a mono input. If you go to stereo, it's going to link inputs one and two together. You have phase invert, you have low cuts, you have a full gate compressor EQ with a five band EQ. You can copy, you can configure everything you want, whether it's a line input, you can even configure the color that it shows on the screen for that input. Pretty damn cool. So if we go back to channel one right now, we can cycle through at the top here. We can cycle through our different inputs. Input number two has phantom power. So if you need to power a compressor mic, you can do that right inside the speaker. We've done that nicely for using podium mics at corporate events. We can run our podium mic right into the back of the speaker with phantom power, all good to go. Inputs three and four are actually a stereo link by default. You can click mono sum to basically sum them into a mono. Five, six is your Bluetooth input. And again, all of these have gates, compressors, EQ configuration. It's a full digital mixer. There also is monitor out so you can configure your main and your monitor out on the speaker. There's also effects that you can apply to all of the different inputs and outputs on this speaker. Guys, the app is just insane. Like for you guys that love digital mixers and need functionality, if you're a band, this thing is sick that it's all built into the speaker. So moving back to the back panel though, show you more of the physical side of it. Input wise, input one is a combo quarter inch XLR. Input two, combo quarter inch. Again, you can link those together to be a stereo input if you wish. There's a quick selector on the back here to go from mic line or a Hi-Z instrument input if you don't want to use the actual app itself. Three and four is a link to stereo input by default. Pretty easy. It's also got two quarter inches as well. There is a foot switch on here. I'm not entirely sure how the foot switch works. That's more advanced, but I believe you can program basically a foot switch to do certain things on it. If you like have a guitar, you can have it shift some of the settings and EQ, I believe. Not entirely sure. You guys that know more about audio can tell me in the comments down below. Down here though, you have two dedicated monitor outs. So like I said, if you're a band, this thing is so freaking cool. You can literally have four monitor outs. If you link two of these together, four independent monitor outs for four individual band members. Pretty freaking sick. And then you have your master system out here if you need to link it to another speaker. It's insane. The back of this speaker is so powerful and honestly, I wish they had a 44 mix because I think bands would really love the power of that 15 inch sub in a 44 with this digital mixer system. But like I said, the app, everything, it is super convenient and it's really cool to be able to use for breakout rooms to have all this powering in digital mixer form right here on the back of the speaker. So overall, if you guys cannot tell from basically my overview here, these two speakers are just the most versatile speakers I think I've ever ran into. And the price is hard to beat in general when you're talking columnary speakers. Everybody talks about like, you know, what's a good thousand dollar speaker that's normally a good price point to be at. These of course, a little bit more expensive. Your normal 28 speaker right now on our website is like $1750. I think that's the map price. And then the mix is only two grand. So when you're talking the mix being a full digital six channel mixer on the back that can be linked with two of them into a 12 channel mixer, like that's in itself is normally like a thousand dollar unit. Like we use the Allen & Heath CQ12 digital channel mixers. Again, you get a little bit more features in a full like digital console when it comes to some of the outputs and also just some of the controls being able to hook it up to a router and actually use wifi to control it at more distance. But that is normally like $900 by itself. So two of these together can make that by itself. So like I said, if you're a band, this is a really, really cool speaker to be on the market to have two of these linked together. For us though, corporate events, this thing has been a game changer that we can run breakout rooms with two, three, sometimes four microphones all right from this speaker. And we get all the inputs. We have phantom power to run, you know, podium mics. This thing's been a game changer. I mean, I love it. It's a great versatile speaker. It works well for cocktail rooms. It works well to just put sound in any room that you need background fill music. It also works well. The base units have been amazing for us when it comes to doing side fills, out fills, back fills, um, everything corporate related. It's an amazing speaker. And like I said, we also use them to DJ with. So our main DJs, except for me and Marcellus that are doing normally 150 plus people all use 28. This has been our go-to sound system for the last probably four, three, four years now since it came out, um, for our DJs. So it's, I can't say enough. This is my favorite all around speaker. It sounds phenomenal. And it is just a great package. So if you guys are interested in learning more about them, we do have them on the website at bowflightingusa.com. We are an official LD dealer for Adam Hall. There's nothing really more to say than, you know, we've becoming a dealer for all the brands that we love and use all day long. We've had these speakers for years, been using them for years. We love LD. It's been a great partnership. So we decided to reach out to them and become a dealer for them. So that way we can provide you guys with the same tools that we know and love. And you get the same customer experience that you get with both Lighting USA and our team here in the warehouse. So overall best speaker on the market, probably.