Great for one or two-man acts.
Stage monitors can be a tricky business. It’s not that they’re difficult to buy or get the right ones, but it can be an arduous path to tweak out their sound. And, they have a daunting challenge to supply the right sound to the right people in an unfavorable environment. Some of the annoyances performers have about monitors are that they take up floor space, they are yet another heavy piece of gear, and they are another expense to worry about. Well, Fender put a great attempt into the 1270 passive floor monitor. It’s not the best-sounding speaker in the world, but it is light, small, durable, and relatively inexpensive.
Weighing in at just 13.5 lbs, the 1270 is small and easily handled. I own two, and could easily carry both under one arm, and I’m built like a 12-year-old girl.
One major design advantage to the 1270 is its positioning options. It can sit on three different angles, depending where and how you want the sound projected on stage. However, they do have a wide disperse, so the sound just kind of goes in all directions anyway.
The flush-mount 10” speaker pumps out 200W of power. The frequency range is 110Hz to 20kHz. The cabinet is made out of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), the same plastic from which your Legos are made. The cabinet is molded very close to the speaker; it looks like the speaker barely fits in there. So the 1270 maxes out space management.
The connections are parallel quarter-inch, great for daisy chaining. It would be nice if the speakers also had XLR or Speakon, but you get what you pay for.
After several years of putzing around with the 1270, I’ve never heard 200 watts worth of power or gotten any signal to explore the reaches of its frequency range. If I pushed my EQ to brighten or clear up the signal, the 1270 reacted with feedback. I was powering my 1270s with a Crown PowerBase-1, then a QSC RMX 850. In line, I always kept a Behringer FBQ3201 Ultragraph Pro EQ with feedback detection. In order to pump these to a comfortable hearing level over drums and other stage noise without distorting, I had to drop out the entire mid-lows, starting around 600Hz. Their tone was boxy and the frequency response was muffled. This is why I ultimately replaced them with Mackie Actives.
However, these monitors do have a place on a small stage. They are perfect for single performers or acoustic duos. I hang onto mine just in case I lose my band one day.
