TomHoward

We have EV ZLX12P as our smallest speaker, but sometimes they are too big for some smaller things - often say a fast fold screen and 2x speakers for a presentation rather than a band or anything.

Does anyone have any recommendations of smaller speakers say 8" in a similar kind of "quality" bracket?

 

I have looked at things like Box Pro:

https://www.thomann.de/gb/the_box_pro_dsp_108.htm

(layout on the back looks suspiciously like an EV!)

 

dB Tech B-Hype:

https://www.thomann.de/gb/db_technologies_b_hype_8.htm

 

This kind of thing - QSC 8" and similar are nice but overkill

The Pixie is brilliant. I have been playing with one today with a string of 50 WS2811 fairy lights. I think it's ArtNet at that price though not sACN if that makes a difference.

It might be worth investigating just how hours a year it is to estimate the payback time with a given saving - just as it’s not a huge load, if you used it 20 hours a week that’s £360 a year in electric, reduce that by 75% for LED and you’ve saved £270, so you just have to price accordingly so you don’t spend more than you save. And 20 hours a week might be a high estimate.

 

The Artistic Licence 4ch is designed just for this, it can go in the consumer unit using some or the existing wiring and they have a nice 4ch DMX wall plate with 4 rotary “dimmers” to go with it. Is the existing system pendant lights or soemtbibg with an ES lamp it doesn’t use Pars or similar?

Can I just ask, 1.7kW of house lighting would cost circa 35p/hour to run?

And even then that's at 100%, if they are dimmable it may not even be that much? Is it worth the investment to avoid or could it be better spend on reducing costs elsewhere?

 

Out of of interest what is the total power of the fluorescent light?

We have a half coupler bolted onto the bottom of a heavy duty hook clamp, with 4ft of scaff in it

40m VGA would probably work but have some shadowing etc. In my experience at the budget end it tends to be more reliable than budget Cat5 solutions or HD-SDI with budget cable, in that those options give a better picture quality when they work, but VGA tends to work straight off. Will probably pick up a bit of static as well.

 

If the spaces are far enough apart that the delay isn't a problem, if you can't hear one venue from the other could you just display the Youtube stream?

There'd likely be copyright issues as suggested, but it might be worth checking Youtube for gameplay footage you could download the audio off for rehearsal purposes.

The one thing I learnt a long time ago with outdoor function was to avoid compression on mics at all costs as the noise created by crowd and vehicles rises in the speakers when there are quiet parts in the speaking.

 

Being in the industry it get my hackles up when I hear a comentator at an event and all the garbage in the silent parts being brought up by the compressor.

It's true enough thinking about it that I don't want anything too aggressive, as otherwise as you say I'll just increase background noise.

I'll have a play with and without with some proper outboard and see if this is worth pursuing at all.

 

The only cross-purposes radio mic I've had was a rehearsal room next to a Jehovah's meeting house, with an old TOA VHF belt pack adapted for an electric violin, and getting a visit from next door halfway through rehearsal to say they were getting violin loud and clear through their PA.

Well, I guess that's than then. I tend to use a bit of compression on 100V as it seems to get the sound slightly less honky (it's mainly to get good level whilst trying to avoid distortion). I have a load of the TOA Sound Projectors (basically a 6" speaker or so in a horn) as I find them slightly less painful than re-entrant horns.

I used to have the DNH Music Horns which cost a fortune but I could never get any decent noise of them.

 

I quite like 100V as there's no dealing with last minute musician requests, and nothing artistic about it, it's run the cables out, "1-2, 1-2, yep sounds terrible let's go home".

 

Delay is another issue but I just leave that one alone and try not to point too many speakers into any given area.

I might get an old Cloud CX335 with the front panel and stick it between desk and amps. Or I might just forget it and throw the Sharks away.

Sorry for such a boring topic, but what is everyone's approach to connecting a single switched dynamic mic or radio mic to a stack of amps for 100V line?

Usually I apply some compression and gating, which seems to help it sound slightly less awful (only slightly), and the gating helps with a radio mic to avoid capturing stray conversations when it's held at the waist between announcements.

 

I've got Behringer Sharks for this at the moment, but I'm not liking them as they have a confusing gain system, no gain reduction or real metering, and they forget their settings every time they are powered down. I don't know if that's just mine but they all do it.

The up side is they are compact, and have preamp, 48V, gating, compression and high pass all in one unit.

 

Most of the cheap single-channel preamps with compression like Art and the like all seem to be valve gimmicks... is there a unit from Cloud or something similarly installation based that fits the bill?

What’s being done on the XR12 if it’s just for a stereo input? Could you just run a 3.5mm input via an analogue compressor if desired then into the power amp?

There’s a limit to how loud the headphone output or Bluetooth output will go, so could you just set it to that and let them use the volume on the phone to adjust?

 

I like Cloud stuff for remote volume, it’s bulletproof but expensive. The old analogue stuff like a CX261 and volume plate.

The cameras and the entire system is an absolute mess of USB power supplies, GoPros, SDI boxes, HDMI splitters to boost long cable runs, etc etc.

Interesting, the ATEM mini in question has a SMPS wall wart down to 12V DC, 18W according to the website though I haven't checked it directly so it's not insignificant draw

I am doing a couple of channels of 1080 scaling on the ATEM as the inputs are 25 or 50fps and output is running at 30fps for Youtube so there is a lot of digital activity going on inside

Dragging back up an existing problem whilst I have 5 minutes....

We have been experimenting with some cameras and due to the cable lengths it's almost certainly going to be IP cameras.

Looking at the TBS box above, this takes IP stream as it's input and will relay to RMTP for Youtube by the look of it.

 

If I say had 3 IP cameras, and I wanted to either have the ability to switch between them, or I wanted to relay onto YouTube with them in a quad screen, for sure I could do this in OBS, so that would require a computer down there.

Is there a hardware way I can do this to avoid the administration of a computer?

 

The other thing I could do is bounce the IP streams away from the pitch, back up to one of the main buildings, and have something there relaying onto Youtube, but it feels like it might be easier self contained.

What’s the cable arrangement change you make, you fit 2x XLR to the isolation transformer directly?

Slight correction... the other side is just induced noise.... not inverted noise. The whole point of twisted pair is to ensure that the same noise signal is picked up on both cores. The differential input then cancels any common mode (noise) signals.

Of course yes sorry, it would carry a copy of induced noise to be inverted, not inverted noise.

 

I don't mean to teach grandma to suck eggs, but I assuming you definitely have the Atem inputs set to line (it can only be done in software I think).

 

I'm also guessing that you have HDMI sources connected so there will be lots of digital 'shash' floating around. My go-to problem solver in this situation, which I come across a lot using Macs, external monitors and audio devices is one of these; https://cpc.farnell.com/pulse/pls00548/ground-loop-isolator-3-5mm-p-s/dp/AV25542?st=loop%20isolator

It's digital shash for sure, as the beating and tone changes with the images on the ATEM. I was feeding it with BBC News for testing and with the white screen graphics it increases significantly.

 

Happily a couple of days ago I had ordered a couple of days ago a couple for ground loop isolators from Kenable to try: https://www.kenable.co.uk/en/audio-cables/audio-adapters/8073-35mm-stereo-ground-loop-isolator-female-to-male-earthing-for-audio-008073-5015972172537.html

Which have improved things. There's still a bit of digital beating but it's much more acceptable.

 

So the last question is, if it's impedance balanced, and if the wiring is done at the output stage (ie at the XLR connector, and the cable itself is single core and screen) is there an advantage to shorting pins 1&3 or does it make no difference?

We've got two that have had typically hard use due to a new-found enthusiasm for streaming, I can't get a clean input on either of mine and I get digital noise carried across from the HDMI inputs if I use a grounded computer, it's only if I use a laptop on it's battery that I get a clean sound. It was particularly bad as there was a cheap unshielded unbalanced Phono-Minijack cable in the mix, but now I've heard it I can't get rid of it. We stream from OBS (there's a mismatch between the input audio levels the ATEM shows in software and the levels it sends to OBS) and I'm going to try just adding a USB audio interface separately to take balanced inputs and see if I can get the sync right to match the delay of the ATEM. I'm trying to find if the delay is consistent or if it wanders.

 

The weird thing we've had on ours is that I think on two different inputs (1 on one and 3 on the other) I think the EDID has died. We have inputs that just flat out refuse to work, while the others do with the same camera, and a camera of laptop doesn't see it's connected to anything and detect the display. They will only work on those inputs when fed via a splitter or something like a SDI-HDMI or HDBaseT box where the output device is seeing something else for the EDID.

Is there not an inverted signal on pin 3 then? How does the balancing work at the other end, or is it not as effective as transformer balanced?

 

Sorry, I've got it. The matching impedance to ground basically means one leg is signal (and induced noise) and the other side is just inverted induced noise, as opposed to symmetrical transformer balancing. Well that's completely passed me by all these years, and I'd always assumed electronically balanced mean the signal was inverted with an op amp rather than there just being signal on one leg.

 

https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-how-impedance-balancing-audio-different-normal-balancing

 

Still doesn't explain why the line inputs on the Atem mini sound so terrible, mind, but it did keep me guessing for a bit longer.

Apologies for a very specific post but I'm trying to understand something;

 

I was messing about earlier trying to cure a noisy input on an output from a Soundcraft EPM12 into an ATEM Mini analogue unbalanced input. There is a ton of digital noise on the input and it sounds terrible.

 

The ATEM is unbalanced stereo input on 3.5mm line level and the EPM12 is on XLR.

 

I was trying different cable wiring, trying with -ve shorted to earth, -ve left floating so only pins 1&3 attached, to see if any made a difference to this static.

In doing this, one time I wired it up wrong, with ground on pin 1, and signal on pin 3 (so basically an unbalanced but out of phase signal).

 

Our of the EPM this gives absolutely no sound, which was odd as once I'd worked out what I'd done I would have expected signal, but out of phase. This made me experiment with shorting +ve and -ve together, which gave me signal as opposed to the silence I would have expected - shorting pins 2&3 on the output XLR doesn't seem to effect the output.

 

The manual says the outputs are electronically balanced. Are these cleverer than transformer balanced, and will avoid a short between +ve and -ve (but this still doesn't explain a lack of signal between ground and -ve), or is it possible the outputs from the Soundcraft EPM series are unbalanced?

 

I tried two different EPM desks and an EFX desk and got the same results. I was going to put a scope on it to see what's going on but before that I wondered if I was missing something.

We use low latency as RTMP from OBS - you set up the session in the browser, then use the stream key to send from OBS - low and ultra low latency seem to be available for us when scheduling the stream?

We used Normal for most everything but still find Low stable. However we are mostly running internally on a decent connection, I think the low latency buffer may cause more problems for playback buffering at the recipient end if their connection isn't amazing.

 

About the only other thing (but it doesn't look like it makes a difference) is our streams are pretty much always scheduled, not via the "Stream Now". The actual scheduling time makes no difference (it's only when it's advertised to start but you can start/stop it whenever) but it may give you more options possibly.

Ta thanks, I was going to buy a few pairs of C2s as they are good value for general cover, but obviously ‘good for £40 a pair’ has a ceiling so would be interested in some slightly better.

Has anyone tried the M5 vs the C2s out of interest? I see there’s a sample recording on YouTube which I’ll have a look at but just interested if anyone has tried both.

It may be worth demoing some Behringer C2s.

We have a pair of C2s in our school studio which I never bother with, because they're £20 a mic so I assumed they weren't up to much, but we had a kid who did blind testing on them and they were almost comparable in his tests to an M201. Which really surprised me, as I didn't know whether the C2 was better than I was expecting, or M201 was worse than I'd always thought.

We found the browser-based Youtube streaming to be really rough compared to using OBS. Using a stream key and OBS allows you to set your own bitrates, use hardware encoding if it's available, etc.