The Mackie SRM 450 is a powered PA speaker for live shows and band practices and things of that sort. These are 2-way, bi amplified speakers that don't require any sort of additional power since they're active. I normally don't do much live sound, but recently the recording studio that I work at put on a show and we had a set of these for the PA. I was told that we also have used them as monitoring on stage, but while I was there setting up and helping with the sound we were using them as house PA speakers. These things can definitely get pretty loud, but the music for the most part wasn't too heavy so we were blasting them to their full potential. They're really easy to set up and to control, and for PA speakers they aren't incredibly heavy as I was able to carry one of them by myself. They now have a newer version of the SRM 450's, but I haven't seen or used them so I can't compare them to these. As far as pure sound quality is concerned, I was definitely pretty impressed with the clarity coming from these speakers, but again we weren't loading it up with too many loud sounds as it was pretty stripped down. I don't know what kind of price we paid for these speakers, but if you can find this version of them now I'd imagine that they would be a bit cheaper since there is indeed a newer version of these out. Macke in generally makes very affordable public address (PA) gear, so I'd be surprised if this wasn't already a deal when the studio got them. If you're looking for a set of powered PA speakers that will get the job done in most situations, the SRM 450's are definitely worth a gander.