paulears

Surely the only issue with colours is that they're connected to the same pin each end. It's not like house wiring where brown hurts and blue usually doesn't? This person you met is in the position off setting rules and being ignorant. He wins, even though wrong. No point attempting to change the mind of these people. I used to when young. Now I just go along with them, and smile - and don't give them lectures they don't want to hear. It's taken me over 50 years to realise that resistance really is futile with folk like this.

A quarter wave for ch 38 is 11.6cm and ch 70 is 8.2cm, but that's from the PCB, not from the case grommet.

Anna - do you remember when your job was very practical and hands on and now like many of us, it's evolved into areas nothing at all like we imagined we'd ever be doing? May I ask a question? - with the musicians getting gaps in their playing, with show on/show off etc, has that impacted on pay? I'm wondering if they benefit or lose pay because of this, or are the extra musician costs sucked up by extra budget made available for health matters? Also - is consistency a problem for the conductor having somewhat random collections of musicians. My other question is about the musicians themselves, do any of them also do other musical activities outside - I wonder how these get factored in, exposure wise. I'm thinking maybe some are perhaps playing elsewhere on their 'rest day', or perhaps giving lessons - that kind of thing. You'd need to know but would they tell you? If they don't tell you - your figures meant to help them, won't? Maybe they're contractually not allowed to, but maybe they do. Our drummer in panto is a good example. He gives lessons at the local university every day, he plays two shows for us, then goes and plays elsewhere ten till midnight. So far, my role has no sound monitoring element to it at all - and I intend keeping it that way as long as I can, but it will happen at some point I'm sure. All I'm bothered about at the moment is counting heads, and when I get to 7 I stop, and don't even notice sometimes if it's a dep in - because that generates paperwork for me!

Thanks for that - I was wrong by a long way, I figured 2008. Way out!

off topic - but can anyone remember when the Diamond 4 was introduced? A rough year would do me?

Well, I'm in trouble as I can't drink alcohol (I can't metabolise it) so since my first pint in 1975, I've drunk Coke - and without C02, fizzy drinks will be off the menu. You can drink flat beer or the non-fizzy stuff, but flat Coke is vile!

Moderation: I've just lost half an hour of my life trying to edit out more of the html - I still haven't got rid of it all, but what is left at least displays. Please note - very few people use strange fonts, random colours and extra big size words - it really isn't how we do things. Please - when you post, spare a while to make yours look like everyone else's, because our members are a strange bunch - me included, and if a post is hard to read - we don't bother. Paul

Surely, when people make career choices, the potential risks to their health from that career have to be partially accepted? I've always been amazed that so many musicians risk their long term health and salary by not protecting themselves. You don't turn up to work on Wagner innocently expecting chamber orchestra levels. Common sense says hearing protection has to be a shared responsibility. In the past couple of years I've taken more steps to protect my hearing than I did in the previous 30 yrs, and while I should have done it before, I made the choice not to. I can't now look back and try to find people to blame. My odd venue always try to follow new rules, but frequently don't understand them. I asked for some earplugs for the crew on one way too loud show we had in. The bar manager had them, thousands, still sealed in the original box. Nobody had ever used them, but they had them.

I bought 100 Chinese copies - they'd copied everything - INCLUDING - the micro-thread, and these could be cross threaded exactly the same way. I've still kept a dozen, sold the rest and everybody was pretty impressed - not one fault in three years and lots of people bought more. They'd not used the same tube - the AKG was, I think plated brass - and these were an alloy and much lighter, but the omni capsules were really good. With the hyper capsules they were really good on table stands for conference top tables. Then suddenly, the factory abandoned production. They will make me a new batch, if I buy 500!

I don't think anyone understood why the stopped the 451 series at all! It was such a brilliant system, and the extension tube idea such a great way of minimising impact. Why they gave up and left the market to Schoeps I never understood.

If you google for intermodulation you'll start to see what happens - not just the frequency spacing, but the deviation too - which is often different between makes, and sometimes even within makes. The big manufacturers even try to make it easy with the popular UHF lines by publishing on their web sites groups of channels that play well together - so if you need say 12, there will be a set of recommended frequencies - but if you need 14, then many of them will be different. If you need less channels, then you can miss some of them out, but you can't just divide the beginning and end frequencies by the number you need and space them evenly. RF wise, it causes all manner of weird problems. They all appear to be interference free, until one transmitter gets a bit to close to another piece of kit and the two of them mix together, and the maths of the sums and differences between them go horribly wrong - and weird warbling and burbling noises suddenly appear, only to vanish when one of the actors moves. You can use clever software to try to do the productions if you have the data on the full specs, which most people don't have - or just use the ones somebody has used before. In the 175MHz band 3 way pretty normal, but there were extra channels going right up to over 200MHz, where DAB is now, and you could then get around 6. The VHF band is just too small for more channels than this.

Indeed - any first aid is better than NO first aid!

If you think this got complicated quickly - when they do it on bass guitar forums, mainly populated by Americans, I think it's good they're not in the same state as they'd shoot each other. There seems to be a camp that can cite solid science to back up their opinions - every way around you can work this one. I'm a pragmatist. My bass amp is pretty powerful, and I work on the principle that it's designed to work down to 2 Ohms. I have a couple of bass cabinets - one is 4 Ohms and the other 8 Ohms. I cannot remember which one is which, and being very honest, even looking it up is pointless. They both work fine. The bigger one sounds louder - but maybe that's also because it's bigger. It also weighs over 60Kg - so maybe after wheeling up or down a ramp this is why I think it sounds louder. Nowadays we seem to get 3 year warranties on many items. If an amp design was poor and the things failed when an ignorant musician simply connected up and played long and loud, they'd be getting lots of warranty claims, Facebook would report the unhappy people, and we'd know about it. You can make the science fit any scenario with a bit of craftiness and pseudo-science. 4 Ohms, let alone 2 Ohms, is as close to a short-circuit as you can get in reality with speakers that are not faulty - so any amp that requires exactly a specific impedance is rarely going to get it. One thing I have noticed over the years is that when you use a meter to test a music cabinet, you rarely get identical readings. An 8 Ohm impedance cabinet might appear to a meter as a DC resistance of between 5 and 7 Ohms - but if you have two supposedly identical speaker cabs, they always differ. Different number of turns on the coil? Slightly different copper wire? high resistance joints?

What struck me was that some of the boxes I have look very similar.design wise - might be worth investigating - I'll email him for more details.

Anyone come across Bishopsound website Seems to be the guy who owned Carlsbro for many years selling direct to customers on amazon, ebay and his own website. Some of the stuff looks very interesting - and it's all quite cheap. 2 x 15" and 2 x18" subs in particular - plus some odder designs - 3 x 12". For the price, you appear to get lots for your money - but of course not having dealers means you can't hear them? I'm looking for a spare PA for a few events, and these could be the answer in terms of cost and size - but would also fit the transport better.

There's another an offset adjustment in the 'cogwheel' box with the gain slider - I've just noticed.

I downloaded the version linked to above, and it has the offset capability? Did you download something different?

I had to adjust the onset on mine too as it was misreading. The only annoyance is that windows insists on re-installing the wrong driver for it every time, so I have to run the driver utility first, then start the software or it can't communicate with the dongle. windows 10 does this on other USB devices I have - which is annoying and I've not found a way to prevent to doing it yet!

Well, no - that really is it. The only drawback is the audio quality isn't brilliant, and it does indicate some spurious signals that aren't there - but in general it actually does a decent enough job. Filtering is a bit iffy - so the front end is wide open, but that makes it useful. As the software is the key, you can do all sorts with them. I'm trying to get mine to decode digital comms, but it's a bit fiddly - I'll get there in the end.

The dongles are amazingly popular for people who want to decode digital comms. SDR+ and the digital decoder work pretty well as analysers, but they have lots of sproggies and audio quality is somewhat unpleasant - but they're certainly doing business.

I must admit I am still amazed that asking for ear plugs in venues found to be unexpectedly noisy creates real problems. Nobody can find them, although they know they have some. Add one local one where the sound man is forced to wear earplugs, despite being the one person who could solve the problem in a heartbeat, but doesn't want to!

I get quite a few calls from firms asking if I have been exposed to noisy working areas, offering a no-win no-fee deal. I say yes. They get excited, until the word entertainment/music is mentioned. Then they always say they can't help and hang up. I've always wondered why?

I do have to smile a bit because this is now 'news', when it's really just the first case of classical music, and it's world having the problem. The rest of the music industry have addressed it for years now, with all kinds of products being on the shelves. Odd that the rock and roll industry saw the dangers and developed protection. I'd bet that when this gets to court, much of the discussion will centre on looking after your own hearing in contrast to the employers duty to look after your hearing. Perhaps it will also be the case that certain musical pieces are so well known for being loud that the orchestra managers and the players all know about it a long time in advice. I'm sure Anna has this problem and mentions it from time to time with her orchestras. The traditional layout of orchestras means everyone should be far more aware of this than random placement when people turn up ay venues. It's sad somebody got injured in this way, but am I the only one who gets bookings, and does a little research into who I'll be working for? When I find it's people known for being very loud, I pack a few appropriate extras into the toolbox. The only thing different in this case is that it's not Phil Collins, it's the butt of so many jokes, the Viola player! I think I'll share it with a viola playing friend on Facebook!

Do a Basil Brush, and stick him and the operator in a box on castors and have him wheeled on. Basil usually has a very simple box, and it often features swappable front and side panels, so it just gets dressed up for the finale. Instead of coming in from the back, he just gets slid on from the side.

I've got three totally different styles of CV on the go for different uses. What makes me smile is that some of the firms I do work for want them updated each year, as some kind of policy. One insist their self employed people must show evidence of continual professional development, yet they changed their policy on providing training themselves to not doing it at all. They are very waspy about you working for competitors, but many of the younger people include the competitor's name as the training provider. Think about a St. John ambulance member getting trained by Red Cross! Last year I told the truth and named my training provider, and in the last year have done one job for them. Sometimes CVs perhaps need sanitising for certain jobs!