intyra

You’re looking for a “knurled nut driver”. They’re quite difficult to find. These should do it, but seemingly out of stock until January: https://www.thonk.co.uk/shop/thonk-knurled-nut-driver/

Re the Thomann t.bone headsets – we bought 20 of these recently. They are: Obviously from the same factory as the CPC headsets A slightly pinker colour than their CPC comrades Slightly more durable and comfortable than the CPC equivalent; they are able to be resized more easily Worse sounding than the CPC equivalent; specifically, all of ours have significant hiss and sound more muffled compared to the CPC equivalents In summary I'd avoid them. For a similar price the Pulse / CPC headsets are significantly better in terms of sound quality, albeit somewhat less durable.

We have a Yamaha MTX5-D which we're considering replacing due to age (and various other reasons; servicing, parts and accessories are tricky), probably with an Allen & Heath AHM-64 with a Dante card installed. Are there any other good options I should be looking at? We need at least 12 analog outputs on the processor (to drive left, right, center cluster, sub, fills, delays, surrounds, hearing loop, etc) and a handful of analog inputs (our show relay mics are routed through it), plus about 16x16 of Dante I/O, along with the usual trimmings of EQ, limiting, etc. I've considered QSC Q-Sys but it seems both overkill and rather expensive for what we're doing. Would love to know if I'm missing an obvious contender.

Thanks for the advice, all. It was a bit of a thought experiment to be honest – we’ve decided to keep everything comms-related analog for now, but move our stage pickup / induction loop / dressing room feed onto Dante. The cost (and complexity) of a system like Green-Go or Bolero is just too much to justify in a small venue!

I only really listen to tracks after tuning a system to a known quantity using pink noise (and Smaart traces). Listening to a song that you know really well will verify you've tuned the system well. I don't think that trying to tune a system to a track is an effective way of getting a consistent and repeatable result, which has to be the number one thing you're looking for when tuning PA.

The vast majority of our venue's sound infrastructure has moved over to being Dante-driven in the past few years, but we maintain a few analog XLR lines between FOH and stage purely for sending (Tecpro) comms over. Is there a good way of converting these lines to the digital realm? We can easily move our stage pickup onto Dante using e.g. a Sonifex DIO9 and AVIO converters, but it seems like to get the actual comms network over there we'd need to move to something like Green-Go, which is a bit more of an endeavour cost-wise.