paulears

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!

Not just theatres suffer this kind of thing - ornate plasterwork in Stately Homes seems to suffer from these kinds of incident, fairly frequently. The one near where I live has some very heavy ornate plasterwork that they discovered is essentially screwed to bits of timber, cross laid on the ceiling timberwork. They discovered movement when they were re-gilding one, and only then did investigation reveal the somewhat 'basic' construction method used. I was told there were wires in the plaster moulding, that once originally raised on a block and tackle were wrapped around a beam and knotted! The elaborate proscenium wall with plasterwork and cherubs in a venue I know well seems to be held upright by a piece of two inch rope that has been carefully spliced and varnished. From the ground there is no evidence of this at all, but perched on a ladder, above the stage looking down, it's visible. I bet nobody knows it's there, or how 'structural' it actually is? Perhaps an area where visual inspection isn't that useful. There are many wonderful ceilings around, but many are so old that the actual construction method is unknown. Thinking about it, how did people get plasterwork up there apart from hauling it, and once up, fixing would really have been quite tricky!

Has anyone managed to get this working on a Mac, via Parallels. Mine cannot see the driver, although parallels can?

I do it the other way around - take the comms audio into a desk channel, and then just pfl it - I use a DT108/9 so take the mic to the comms pack, and the audio our from the pack goes to an XLR wired only to pins 2 and 3 - because comms earth don't like being connected to real earth. Works fine for me.It also enables anyone on the comms circuit to get access to the PA too, if needed. Obviously needs care, but handy for those odd announcements that often crop up, and save the sound op having to write it down and read it out when the person with the details can just do it!

Indeed! I'm old enough to remember when the film Convoy started people importing 27MHz CB radios and doing the UK version of the rubber duck, good buddy thing (which, with an East Anglian Accent, as pretty funny) - and somebody brought me one they had tweaked to give more output to look at. They'd turned trimmers until they had maximum output on their 'swarrr' meter. There was indeed plenty of output, very little though where they wanted it. I tried a mic pack hanging about and it seemed sproggie free, but a little AKG guitar bug on the shelf that I've used occasionally was pretty different - lots of quite strong outputs - which perhaps explains why it sounds good, but is quite cheap. I guess it's tiny size precludes much in the way of filtering!

I got one of the dongles for 7 quid! Amazing value. Ordered the day this topic was posted, arrived today from Hong Kong.

The thing that makes me intrigued is that whenever these sad events happen, and they get discussed on forums worldwide - with pretty much the same results as on the BR, there are so many people who from the pics can produce quite sensible sounding explanations, and very often have experience to backup how dangerous the incident was. If everyone is so knowledgable and experienced, then how do they keep happening. Do the people who see these things when they are place and not collapsed point them out with the same efficiency as they do post-collapse? I'm not pointing fingers - but it does seem that the people actually there before these accidents don't seem to be able to predict them. We've had wind based incidents fairly often, and I wonder if the structures were upright and totally rigid before they collapsed, or did they start to show instability when the wind started to pick up - and nobody noticed before the danger point was reached. If the structures are insured - and I'm talking about the big ones really - then shouldn't somebody from the insurance company inspect them before they are used. Maybe this does happen, but signing these off must be a rope around the neck if the thing fails.

I note one thing is clear on the BR where rigging is concerned. None of our rigging (as in proper rigging) people ever seem to be slapdash or less than safety minded. Often (me included) we've got into deep water by detailed questionable processes being pulled apart by those who know. I can't see that as a bad thing. As a person who sometimes works around or even under heavy items put there by others, there's obviously concern that what is up, stays up - but to the non-expert, so much of this stuff looks to the person on the ground to defy physics. Looking at the pictures of this one - to my untrained eye there does seem to be a huge amount of what looks like scaffolding - not the usual truss. Unloading just a few boxes of decking legs makes even the in-expert realise how heavy scaff is. I'm not really a festival person, and I understand the concept of the truss used in these events - but can I ask? Is it usual to build the means of supporting the cover/tilt/roof out of scaff?

A 2000W amplifier does NOT always put out 2000W, irrespective of the setting of the front panel attenuators. 2000W (or whatever the spec says) is the maximum power handling capability of the output devices, and the spec tells you essentially how powerful it is driven to maximum output by a specific maximum input. Ohm's law will work to let you calculate the figures, if you have all the variables. What is certain is that the actual running current the amplifier will require is far below what you estimate. You cannot even start to work it out when playing your favourite test track. Playing a constant tone allows some sensible results, but who does this. Music that is bass heavy will increase the current, and music with less full range content will be less. The advice to use one of those cheap Maplin meters is actually quite sensible, and in normal use the power consumption is actually much lower than expected, or calculated using estimated variables. Many amplifier manufacturers provide a figure in Amps for power consumption, but is that idling, or an average, or peak inrush current. This can be many times the running current, hence why amp racks that lose their power trip the breaker when power gets re-applied. For what it's worth, I watched one of our visiting bands use one of these Maplin meters - on just one in a rack of 4 Peavey 2600 amps, he was very puzzled that even though the red peak light was just 'tickling' on, it was drawing less than 3 amps. Perfectly normal.

MAD manual This has the 305HP, not HT in it - not sure if it's helpful or not?

All I do is use a pair of Beyer DTs with the lead split through a small breakout box to send the mic signal to the Tecpro pack 4 pin connector. The audio out that goes to the headphones normally, is diverted to an XLR wired pins 2 and 3 - no connection to the pin 1 earth allowing the comms circuit to be isolated from audio earth. On the mixer the channel used for comms in isn't routed anywhere, and hitting the pfl gives conventional comms. All the usual monitoring can be done as usual, just switching pfl in when it's needed. It also offers a useful extra function in that it is possible to route comms to PA or even monitors if you wish - I've used this a few times in rehearsal when the dsm can't get hold of the director because they're faffing about - he can ask for a PA and just talk on the cans to everyone. Damn handy system, and just takes a small amount of wiring

Could I just say that doing what you did is unlikely to endear you to the venue. Somebody in the office gets the mail, passes it to their manager, who probably takes pleasure in passing it to the tech manager, who has to find the person who knows, only for them to say it was in, and was taken out at or just after the house opened. Maybe I'm alone, but if I had an email get to me asking a question like that, I'd worry firstly that you might be the authorities attempting to check up, or an interfering member of the public, about to complain to the authority - I'd find it difficult to believe somebody was 'just interested'. As people have attempted to say, although many venues do drop the iron or just raise it in public sight, they may not actually have to. As I said in another thread on the same subject, at my venue, the requirement got removed quite a few years ago, and the iron is not even mentioned in the latest licence. Our fire self-assessment simply states we will keep it and the drencher in good condition. Although I know what you mean about the wiki it's rather odd that this particular wiki entry (which I'd forgotten about) was written by 3 people who have been around for a while, and do know what they are doing. So it's always best to check that the wiki entry that you felt may have not answered your questions, wasn't written by 3 of the Blue Room Mods - which it was - before posting this kind of question on the Blue Room where the very same people will read it!

No - where is the USB connector. The mixer you have allows you to take a number of sources, and mix, wipe and key them over each other. You can play a tape, hit freeze, and the mixer will store that one picture until you release it. It doesn't hold or store any pictures - not what it is designed for. In an edit setup with old fashioned tape machines, the way you have described is correct. In these kind of setups, then the edit controller (you do have one?) pre-rolls the recorder and the two playback machines, then it runs them all, and at the appropriate time the record machine drops into record, and then the MX-70 wipe, or disolve is triggered automatically. That is pretty well all that can be externally controlled. The majority of mixer controls are manual only. There isn't really much more to say. What were you thinking the Panasonic could do, other than what I've explained? Paul

I suspect Victor has edited out the reference to Maxi-Nav, as it only appears as a reply in the second post - this is a bit wierd. I'm concerned that Victor may be trying to something a litttle unusual. He refers to loading images - I wonder if he's attempting to use the freeze function to grab an image - something that can only be carried out live on the MX-70. Digibeta machines will obviously go into the Panasonic via composite - these machines only have composite and component - no y/c which the Panasonic has. So no problems getting video in. We'll have to wait for Victor to get back to us for part 2.