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Tim McCulloch

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    System engineer/designer for USA "regional" sound/lights/staging provider. 25+ years in the industry.
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    Tim McCullcoh

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  1. IATSE Local 190 here, formerly Secretary-Treasurer and currently recording secretary. The Blue Room forums are not especially welcoming of we folks from the Colonies.
  2. I think you posted this on a couple of USA forums, too. If you connect Harman HiQNet's Audio Architect to the I-Tech and select "crossover" from the amplifier's control panel you can raise the "crossover output" for the sub pass band - I suggest adding 3dB to start. DO NOT change any other settings, especially the protective limiter settings.
  3. Greetings from the other side of the Big Pond, and inside Donald's Wall... How much Light is needed to illuminate 800 people? It depends on how they are dispersed - packed tight or scattered about. Loudspeaker coverage is analogous. You need to estimate how much area is covered by the loudspeaker at a given distance from the loudspeaker. You need to get the loudspeakers UP over the audience and aim them down (some loudspeakers have 2 pole mount sockets, one at 90 degrees and the other around 75 degrees. How loud does the sound need to be, at what distance? There is actual physics involved here and the better you can define the performance goals of the sound system the better advice you'll receive. Have fun, good luck. Tim Mc
  4. The K&M tilts are certainly useful. It's worth bearing in mind that they shift the centre of gravity, so it helps to be using tripod stands that have a decent footprint. I vaguely remember someone on ProSoundWeb who built a tilt that kept the centre of gravity directly over the pole. It was a very impressive piece of engineering but quite expensive. The "balanced tilter" by Nimrod Webber. Product site: www.BT-12.com https://forums.prosoundweb.com/index.php?topic=140040.0 Another ProSoundWeb contributor has a simpler and less expensive tilter, being sold by "Stagehand Systems".https://forums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/topic,167586.msg1546432.htm
  5. A comment from the other side of the Big Pond - The BBC article is spot on. For me the highlights are crowd noise, locale-based SPL limits and audience expectations. The first 2 are hand-in-glove linked - people screaming and yelling and having full voice conversations whilst the performance is going on. The amount of noise local to an individual can easily be louder than the PA system 150 ft away (inverse square law); audiences have gotten much ruder in the last 20 years. I remember when audiences would whisper during a Bob Dylan concert, now it's a free for all. Local SPL limits mean this: the *show*, either in the form of the tour itself or the promoter is fined when SPL from the show exceeds stated limits. The police don't go after the audience because any ONE individual isn't capable of exceeding the limit but en mass they are. So the promoter or band management has to pay the fine at settlement (deducted from proceeds) if the Mixerperson turns it up to get over the audience. Audience expectations - a source in the article mentions ear buds and that means the audience "knows how it's supposed to sound" but I think there is little that could be further from the truth. The versions of music distributed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and presumably the streaming services as well, have 'remastered' the audio with multiband compressors to "maker everything louder than everything else." There is very little dynamic range because the loose fitting ear buds are too leaky - the result is that lower level audio is masked by ambient noise around the listener. Ditto for tonal EQ; it's been bass-enhanced because of the poor seal between the earbud and the ear canal. The result is that audience members THINK they know how something is supposed to sound, but even if they have well fitted ear buds, what they are hearing bears only a passing resemblance to what the artists and producer heard when the tracks were originally mastered. The iTunes and Google Music customers, the Amazon subscribers, the Pandora/Spotify listeners complained loudly and since these tech giants have no musical soul they consider tonal modification and extreme "normalization" to being good customer service, while it's a disservice to the performance and production of the original... but the casual listeners frankly don't care about that so from a commercial perspective, the content providers are right. Finally there's the issue with putting on shows in sporting venues. As pointed out in the article stadia and arenas are designer to transmit and reflect sound as part of the fan experience. The multiple reflections and RT60 times are pretty much the antithesis of what is needed for amplified music but nobody is building 50k-80k capacity venues for live music, so what to do... As Frank Zappa said when opening a Mothers of Invention show with the LA Philharmonic "When you make music in a room designed for hockey, you take your chances. Hit it, Zuben!" If the support artist sounded fine and coverage of the audience was even, relative to the later reports of inconsistency when the Spice Girls went on the possible points of failure are the Mixerperson selecting the wrong show file on the console; the system engineer making previously agreed-upon changes on behalf of the Spice's Mixerperson and somehow altering previous settings or choosing the wrong preset; something got unplugged (signal, power, control data); perhaps several other places the technical situation went sideways. From the Colonies, Tim Mc p.s. Have you heard Sir Elton's piano? Neither has he!
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