J Pearce

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)

BNC crimp connectors are usually matched to the cable type you are using to ensure a good solid reliable connection (RG59 vs RG6 for example). Choose your cable then choose the matching BNC crimp end. Canford have a nice article about cable selection for SDI. I tend to use Van Damme 278-175 for install and Van Damme 268-175 for flexible - though our stocks of analogue spec 268-306 will carry SDI for shorter runs. SDI is far less forgiving than composite video, so your terminations need to be good. Good quality connectors will always be easier to terminate than cheap ones and are usually more resilient too. Neutrik market some of their terminations as "HD" and these are verified up to the higher bandwidths that SDI uses.

I've got a bundle of the blackmagic convertors. They're good, but get rather warm in use so need ventilation, and I've had a few die - I think due to earth loop currents across circuits. Depends what BNC crimp tool/die you have as to whether you will need another, they're generally specific to the cable/connector combination.

We didn't mic the 4x12"s, they were there for monitoring, set dressing, and support bands. My desk feed came off the XLR on the back of the kemper. Also, for that band playing melodic death metal (with a medieval theme) all the guitar sounds wanted to sound like a 4x12". If you want a fairly flat speaker to recreate what cab modelling the Kemper is doing I'd be looking at a small wedge monitor (active or passive to suit your kemper setup).

Another point to consider is that accessibility often makes everyone's life easier and safer. Which is better, a cat ladder to the grid or a lift that you can put a motor box and 4 humans in? I'd also not forget things like training stage door and duty techs in basic sign language, and considering whether a local T loop at stage door is worthwhile. Does the fire alarm have flashing beacons as well as sounders? Do your stairs all have tactile edge strips? Does your signpost signage have braille? Do you have a planned process for inducting a blind person into your space and showing them what is where? Would powered doors open access up to users who would struggle to open a heavy door (wheelchair and crutch users, folk with muscle/joint issues)? Control positions - could a shorter/taller human or wheelchair user access the controls and see the stage from your control positions (inc SM desks here) - I know most folk shorter than me have to stand on a bit of deck at one of our sound control positions to get a good view of stage. Rather than dumping consoles on deck or flightcases, might a powered adjustable table be more flexible? One that's just come up for us - video show relay into dressing rooms is rather more useful than audio show relay for a d/Deaf company. They brought some nifty wireless cuelight type devices which they used as their backstage calls devices - could a new install incorporate something like this (even just cuelight circuits to DRs and sufficient circuits on the master controller)?

Aylesbury Waterside has lift access to fly floors and grid (and I think by extension the bridges, but it's been many years since I was up in the roof there).

Are the 4 outputs needing separate switching/mixing - if so you want a video router. If not you just want a vision mixer and a video distribution amplifier.

I've toured with guitarists using Kempers. On big gigs we dragged our 4x12"s with us. On small gigs we brought a small active speaker. The guitarists usually preferred the small active speaker.

I've not noticed issues between AFILS and SDI, but if you were really concerned I'd look at a HDMI over CAT5/6/7 system, as the twisted pair nature of the cabling should make it pretty resistent to magnetic radiation. I'd probably be looking at HDBaseT. Many HDMI CAT5/6/7 systems do distribution to multiple screens which might be cleaner than a whole pile of SDI converters and distribution. The cabling is also cheaper and termination is more accessible (a good BNC crimp tool is £100+, vs CAT5/6 termination kit which can be found very cheaply).

My opinions on this industry's use of casual labour would probably fall foul of the no politics rule, so I shall stop there.

A few places I've worked have had shared boots available for casuals, which fulfilled an obligation but no-one ever used them.

There is no legal minimum - just what the risk assessment for that activity calls for. We all work in different scenarios - I need toe and midsole protection, hard hat and hearing protection. My stage colleagues sometimes need knee pads and gloves as well but use cheaper hearing protection as they don't need to hear as well. My lighting colleagues use harnesses, both work positioning and fall arrest. FOH need bodily fluid kits and earplugs. Our maintenance tech needs all sorts that I don't need. Show blacks are not PPE. That's uniform, and again may or may not be provided depending on company policy.

They are legally obliged to supply any PPE identified as required by the risk assessment for that activity. No more, no less.

Many suppliers won't send out 100m CAT5/6 multis as the patching inside the racks would push you over the 100m spec for ethernet (and thus dante). Yes it will almost certainly still work, but when it fails and the show gets pulled who's at fault?

70 or 75m is fairly common. 90m isn’t unusual for ethercon looms (leaving 5m for patch at either end within the 100m spec).

From memory the diode is in reverse parallel with the LED which we surmised allows a small current to pass which the base unit uses to detect the presence of an outstation (the absence of this diode prevented the system from working).

The old GDS outstations are not electronically complex, though have a little more in them than the old old two lamps and a button style. We reverse engineered one to make a solid state relay controller for some rope light and buttons on the fly floor (saves the flys op walking back to the cuelight every cue!). I think the notes for the reverse engineering left with a member the staff who did it, or were possibly binned once we finished the job. I remember needing to add a diode so that the cuelight controller could detect a cuelight was plugged in. Depending on how pretty you want to make them you could probably do it all point to point in a project box with no need for any circuit board. If you're making a few of them up then a circuit board would make your life easier and not cost very much. I'm off for a few days now, but if I remember I'll open one up when I've next got 5 minutes and see if I can reverse engineer it again.

The specs on the models I've used show that they are vaguely cardioid. On a few occasions I've had issues with dead spots that have been solved by switching to omni antenna. Equally I've solved a few issues by using directional antenna with the null pointed at a noisy source.

We usually try to get ours well above head height, usually on a perch or fly floor area. A tall mic stand will do if that's not possible though. The conundrum of where to point directional paddles is part of the reason I don't use them... I'd probably go for one of the DS corners pointing to MS the other side, and then maybe US the same side pointing across again.

I usually cover a good 30m radius range on passive omni paddles on up to 20m of good coax. This is with spot licensed frequencies in the 606-678MHz band. I often find that directional paddles can cause as many problems as they solve, so normally keep these for IEM transmitters rather than receivers. However, if your radio mics are used only in one small area (from the perspective of the antenna) a directional antenna can be useful - for example receivers at FOH rather than stage. They can also be useful if you need to avoid another transmitter (often a problem around Brum with Sutton Coldfield piling out 200kW on frequencies within the common 606-678MHz radio mic band), as you can point the null of the antenna at the rf noise issue. I usually stick to the matching brand of RF distribution, but there's no real reason you have to. If it meets the specs then it should be fine. Some systems offer the advantage of powering receivers via the RF distribution, which can reduce spaghetti somewhat.

I made something similar (in a bit of a hurry) using a project box, an XLR4 tail, two 1:1 isolation transformers, and 2 XLR tails. I plugged the XLR4 into a comms pack on the system and used that to do all the complicated electronics. A better solution would use an attenuating transformer to better match the line level input to the mic level the comms pack expects. As I was in a rush I just turned down the output that was feeding the box...

We use the Sennheiser Tourguide systems for both assisted listening and audio description, which work on RF. Ours sit in the license free portion of C70. We have a mix of stethoscope and bodypacks with neck loop listening devices (which also have 3.5mm sockets for headphones or whatever else the user might have). (We also have mobile connect in our main auditorium. It's great, very clear, has some onboard processing at the user's end to adjust sound clarity, but ultimately downloading an app and connecting to the correct wifi is usually too much hassle and most users just collect a RF receiver. We're looking at whether we hold some devices in stock and just issue a device instead of working on BOYD - these may also double up as caption tablets too).