J Pearce

Are you looking for storage that you then pick and prep from for each gig, or a storage system that you take out with you to gigs? If the latter, something for a truck/van/splitter/car boot/rucksack? I'm a big fan of rack drawers in rolling racks, both for storage and on gigs. Within each drawer either the original mic pouch, neoprene pencil cases, or if you're feeling fancy foam (picknpluck or super fancy CNC cut). If you do pouches then they want labelling - neon cloth tape is good for this, and allows you to add a colour code too (maybe something like vocal/dynamic instrument/condensor instrument/drum). Drawers allow for thematic sorting too. If you want something you can throw in your car then I'd go for briefcase flightcases, with the same options as the rack drawers. I'd probably line the inside with some case foam to take out the worst of the bumps. I'm not a fan of the tube foam mic boxes, they're only good for SM58 size mics, you can't easily tell a B58 from an SM58, and I find them quite bulky for the amount they hold. My personal stock lives in an oversized briefcase/trunk flightcase that was cheap. Mics that have fancy boxes live in those boxes in the trunk, the rest in pouches (original or neoprene). Not had a damage issue yet, and they've travelled fairly extensively in vans and car boots. The work stock lives in boxes or pouches on warehouse racking, getting prepped into trays or flightcase drawers for shows as needed.

My instructor at a recent first aid course said the burn sachet stuff is good, but if you use it and then go to hospital the first thing they'll do is scrub it all out - which might be unpleasant.

Cool story. Hope you enjoyed the bread pudding. The precedence effect (sometimes called the Haas effect) would suggest that a 23ms delay should be below the human threshold of delay perception - but perception is variable, and I suspect many of us here could detect 23ms when system tuning - whether as a phasing or as an echo. In another vein - 8m plus a reverberant room might have got there. A horrible reflection off a hard wall perhaps? Or 8m is a rough estimate and actuallt it was much further? Really, without knowing the system setup we’re all guessing. Maybe there was a 50ms delay tuned in somehow - not something I’d do or have seen done, but there’s a whole world out there. I think the important point I wanted to make is that there is no way the ADC, processing, and DAC latency from a digital radio mic or digital sound desk would have produced the effect described by the OP.

The acoustic delay at 8m is around 23ms. That's enough delay that it could upset you. The analogue sound desk will introduce absolutely zero delay. Some sennheiser radio mics with LCDs are digital, some are analogue. The digital mic/receiver combo introduces around 3ms of delay/latency. The analogy setup should be entirely latency free. There may have been a system processor or digital amplifier introducing somewhere between 0.7ms and 5ms of additional delay. I suspect the main component of your issue was that you were 8m away from the speakers. This is a significant contributor to the use of IEMs on large scale events - it's very hard to keep arrival times constant. With practice one can get used to speaking against a delay, the FOH paging system at a previous job introduced 20ms of processing delay and another at least 30ms of acoustic delay between speakers and the location of the paging mic. At first this really tripped me up, but it didn't take long for me to focus on my voice both acoustically and via bone conduction rather than the paging system.

Most are sodium chloride (table salt), potassium chloride (often sold as low sodium salt replacement), and citric acid. Some also add glucose powder. Those with glucose powder may be an issue for diabetics - an easy question to ask before giving treatment. I can’t see that being allergic to sodium or potassium chlorides is compatible with being alive, and a brief search suggests that citric acid is at worst an irritant and cannot provoke an allergic response.

Vincent is an ex-colleague of mine, top guy. Glad to hear he's doing well. Amersham college is a good shout too 🙂

Worth talking to Sir Henry Floyd Grammar in Aylesbury. They have a performing arts tech there (me for 3 years) who might have suitable teaching experience and be up for some freelance work.

We often run our d&b D20 amps on AES over CAT5/6. We use the ratsound breakout boxes at present, but are planning on building a more custom patchbay. I think we're only using UTP (or at least only using UTP patches at either end), on a run that's probably 20m or so (maybe more via the trunking). Works great, and hasn't shown any issues. AES3 (AES/EBU) on XLR is a balanced topology, apparently often implemented using RS422 transceivers. Some may be transformer isolated (EBU spec) and not need a ground, some may not and by spec should probably have a ground reference to ensure the line voltage does not exceed the common mode rejection of the receiver. If you're pulling cable and can afford the jump I'd usually spec FTP or STP over UTP. It's much easier to lose a shield if it's causing issues than it is to gain one when its absence is causing issues.

I've been on a show that used the Sparkulars. They worked great, and I didn't notice a significant extra amount of dust, certainly less than you'd expect from pyro. You still want a small exclusion zone, but probably not as big as pyro, and you can kill the output at any time unlike a pyro where once you've fired it you've got very few options apart from wait for it to finish. They are still quite noisy, which can be a + or - depending on what you want to achieve.

I think you'll probably be best served by getting either a consultant or one of the install companies in. There's some work to be done here, and you've already said you don't have a lot of knowledge in the area. You probably want a quantity of profiles for the FOH bars (or maybe some good fresnels - certainly not LED PARs!), and a quantity of washlights for onstage (maybe some battens if you use a cyc at all). It sounds like you'll then need circuits converting to hot power and DMX cabling and distribution installing. That's a project, not buying some units from a box shifting company and installing them.

d&b is rider friendly. EM acoustics make good boxes that are comparable to d&b in quality (I'd personally put d&b above, but they're certainly in the same league as them). We've got Bugsy in at the moment, which is on EM Acoustics new R10 boxes (with R8s for stage foldback). It sounds great, very similar to our d&b rig. For your size venue you might find d&b Y series is more than enough, it depends how rock and roll your rock and roll touring bands are. For most seated audience 'revue' type shows a good Y series system would be fine, for standing audience touring bands you probably want V. We have 4 Y series boxes a side (2 Y7, 2 Y10, plus 2 subs a side) and can achieve a clean volume far in excess of anything I'd want to mix to in our 860 seat space - though I wouldn't say no to a pair of B22s... If you're doing standing in the stalls for rock and roll another approach might to add an additional ground stack for those gigs, giving extra bass and the extra volume in that area.

Our friendly scottish youtuber did the phono to lemaitre pyro thing some years back, (possibly before he was a youtube hit?).

If they have a bluetooth headset that works well for them (thinking of zoom etc over the last few years...) then this bluetooth comms pack from Altair might be handy?

A bigger headset like a Beyerdynamic DT108 should fit over a hearing aid comfortably. Or TMH's suggestion of bodging a local loop might be a good route.

Any modification to stairs/gangways needs careful consideration and risk assessment. But, done properly, on most staircases, tactile edging (and wheel bumps at the top of stairs) improves safety for pretty much everyone. Needs the right solution for each staircase - one size fits no-one etc.

Ah - there are two interspace systems - the Mastercue which is the conference cueing system, and the TheatreCue which is a theatrical cueing system (built under license from Leon Audio in Aus)

ETC/GDS and Interspace/Leon Audio have the market as far as I am aware. I've not used the latest iteration of the ETC system, but I have used the Interspace and found it very good - the way the cabling and addressing works is very flexible. I seem to recall we had an issue with button caps falling off though.

Even if you get it to connect you’ll probably end up in driver hell. There are some very affordable USB sound interfaces available, get something up to date.

We have a small stash of Lemo to threaded 3.5mm adapters so that we can use the cheap CPC headsets with our Senn 2000s (reterminating the CPC headsets to Lemo would double their value...) They work fine, the tail of the adapter can be a little awkward, but we tend to use the CPC headsets for corporate style events, they wouldn't be appearing on one of our musicals. The same seller has what you appear to need - might be worth playing with before committing to hacking the packs apart?

It's not really an ETC desk, it's an AVAB desk, brought out after ETC acquired AVAB. It has a few interesting features, and back in the older days of EOS 1 was superior for busking, now much overtaken by EOS 2 and 3. Once I got my head round it the swearing decreased to only 3 expletives a minute. My favourite Congo moment was one crashing just as I dimmed the lights for the first dance at a rather high budget wedding in Brum Town Hall. Sorry OP, we're probably not helping much are we? It has some value, but it's probably not going to shift quickly.

Depends what work you want to do. Do you want to do music events, corporate events, sports and other 'special' events, touring with a band, theatre (touring or producing), or ...? A hire/production company is probably a good starting place, especially over the summer period when outdoor events is the mainstay of the industry. I'd echo Tim's comments, but you're in an ideal position to try it for a summer and see how it feels. Some love it, some don't. Do be very honest about your skills, but do also sell yourself. Work ethic and being a nice human are far more important than knowing everything.

At present the industry has a massive shortage of staff. I'd send some emails to companies you want to work for, being really honest about your experience level and see what you can get. If you've completed a computer science degree you probably have some computer networking skills that could be in high demand in some corners of the industry. Similarly if you're a good coder there's some demand for people who can build gadgets and small applications for specific functions. Worst case you'll make reasonable money pushing boxes and rigging lamps all summer. Best case you'll find a corner where you can be a software engineer and a lampy.

I can think of a few people who'd buy one just to enact a ritual destruction of it. (No it was never my favourite console, and one particular unit in Birmingham nearly had an appointment with the nearby canal) They're still useful consoles, you should make a few hundred off it at least.

Really? Because I can make a whole lot of noise using much less than that. I've seen much claimed, but I've never needed to dump that much power into a driver. 3500W is 20A of current at 8 ohms. Most of the amps in my venue are 700Wch at 8ohm. There are some big subs out there that can take that much, but only if you're looking for 110dB + out of them. Even the big L'acoustics subs are only spec'd for 2600W each. Additionally most amps can only generate that sort of power running at 2ohms, which introduces issues such as power loss in the cable (unless you're dragging 6mm speakon around, and degraded damping factor). If you really think you need that power then don't let me stop you, but the easiest way to make your amp rack lighter may be to engineer out some of the overkill.

Athom bulbs can be reflashed with something like WLed which would allow SACN or Artnet control. (I've got several Athom bulbs flashed to ESPhome embedded in old strand lights, giving me home automated retro lighting. It keeps me out of trouble I guess)