J Pearce

Powercon panels can be a nice compact way of enabling amps to combine onto one supply, or take independent feeds. Say a 32/1 to 4 powercon outlet distro, then a panel with 4 powercon inlets. Keep 4 powercon links and 4 13-powercons with the rack and you've got a lot of flexibility.

Some of the new mini hearing aids don't have a T loop option as they are not physically big enough to contain enough coil to receive the signal. These types are not usually issued by the NHS, but by private providers.

Smaart and a good audio interface ought to make a reasonable job of most tests, though not sure if it can do THD? Most interfaces now can do 24 bit, so I doubt you’ll find anything sufficiently flat response with 16 bit, and I’m not aware of anything 20 bit.

Impact will send a tub via courier, they've done this for a kabuki hire for me before. Hawthorn are probably closest for you though.

I’ve been in a reasonably paid education bubble since leaving university, partly because I enjoy teaching (and appear to be at least half decent at it), and partly because I get paid a vaguely reasonable amount for my expertise and graft. I don’t really mind working hard, nor long hours, as long as sufficient breaks are timetabled and I’m paid fairly for my time, my knowledge and experience, and my grafting. As Kit says above, there have been some insulting wages posted, Chief LX roles at £19k for example. I have little desire to be rolling in money, but I’d like to pay all my bills and have a little left over for ‘enrichment’. Most advertised tech jobs wouldn’t cover my half of a fairly small 3 bed terrace in a not very desirable area of Brum.

£250 a unit? Inc. or Ex. VAT? I suspect you’re quite tight for your spec on that budget. £400-£600 a unit is probably more realistic for professional quality rather than DJ equipment, more again for theatre/corporate grade.

It'd be interesting to discuss how much the sharing of show photos (both press and social media) has pushed for lighting that looks spectacular on camera. After all you can't take a photo that captures the intensity of the acting, but you can photograph set and beams in haze. I've certainly had directors request certain looks because they'll look good in the photos, I wonder if similar pressure exists from producers/investors in the commercial theatre world?

I think there’s room for both idioms. A box set drama calls for carefully bordered lights and good facial lighting. A musical may want something more spectacle based and non-naturalistic. Many rock bands aren’t that interested in being lit and want to see a light show around them to give some visual interest. It’s a question of artistic taste, and appropriateness for the medium you are working in surely?

A small din rail box with some delay contactors might be a good solution, if each socket on each circuit waits 1 sec from the previous socket that should easily spread out the surge without causing significant delay to power up. Easy to do if your wiring is in spurs, more complex if the outlets are wired as a ring (it’d have to be a din rail box at each outlet probably).

I think it is best if all the preferences needed to run a show live in the show file. So patches/addresses etc. should all live in the show file. That way swapping a machine out is (nearly) as simple as reloading the show file (plus any port config handled by windows). I suppose UI settings might want to live separately, but it wouldn’t bother me if they lived in the show file too, it’s easy enough to make a template file with the UI setup to your liking.

Can you mix the Motorola PMR feed into the IEM at the mixer end, so you're listening to both all the time via IEM? Then just grab the PMR pack off your belt and talk into it when you need to reply.

When viewing a 32" screen from 10m or more away I doubt anyone will notice the difference between SD and HD. Latency and contrast will be far more significant.

Personally for me, most just the OSC equivalents of MSC Go/Stop etc. For triggering a lighting desk/video server/whatever. So just being able to send a single OSC string would be fine. I mostly use Multiplay as a low budget QLab, for shows who can't afford a QLab license or mac, or where I'm given a windows machine and told to use VLC/Windows media for playback. Multiplay's portability is a great help in those scenarios, keep it on my USB and even if I don't have admin rights I can play out a nice ordered cuestack and keep my attention on the stage and desk, rather than worrying about which file is next. To that end, I'm not usually doing much advanced stuff in Multiplay, but the ability to send (receive?) an OSC command could be very useful for automating desk scenes/liasing with lighting etc.

While you’re looking at serial cues, would an update to include OSC or raw TCP be too much work? RS232 was great 10 years ago, but is now increasingly out of date and being supplanted by TCP or OSC. Totally understand if it’s beyond the scope of a software project that doesn’t really earn you anything.

I suspect I know which venue this query relates to, and I would be very cautious about anything that prevents full use of the iron in that venue, due to the age of the venue, the materials is it made from and contains, and how the fire compartments were designed. Not showing the iron to the audience is a different matter, but often this request is on the basis of scenery/tech equipment in the way of the iron. For those that do occasionally obstruct the iron it is worth considering whether your alarm system automatically drops the iron, and if so what chaos would ensue when the iron descends. False alarms are not unheard of...

It's ambiguous. I'd use fan-in / tail-in, plug spider / socket spider, or plugs to soca / soca to sockets. Got a story to tell?

For brief experiments card is fine, then once you have a good size cut from cinefoil. Saves wasting the expensive stuff.

Exciting news David. Do you want to share the donation link? I’ve used it sufficient times that I don’t mind sending over some reimbursement for your time.

I completely get JSB's point. I sometimes work in a venue that gets a lot of the same shows, and while I've never had a safety issue it is clear that with crew working silly hours something could easily go wrong. One tour that came through had the crew finishing a load out in Edinburgh at 1am, then driving down (in 3 sprinters) to Brum for a 9am load in working through to a 1am load out. Normally thankfully, it isn't this bad, but it's not rare at all. I wouldn't want to be around them on the M6! That tour managed to leave half their cabling in Scotland, so evidently the schedule was causing them to make mistakes... The issue of freelancers being made responsible for their own safety while not really being given the chance to schedule or have much say in how things work on the day is something the industry needs to look at. I've seen it all kick off when a sound company (rather sensibly considering the setup) had two crews leapfrogging the tour, but the promoter wanted the same team everyday. It's interesting to be venue staff and watch different shows on different budgets come through, some doing 3 days on 2 off, some doing 21 days on 1 off, some with plenty of locals booked and the tourers coordinating, some with the tourers doing everything. The touring schedule seems usually to be set by the artist and their requirements, with crew left to take it or leave it; and some crew inevitably take it. I've had a show come in and we were having issues with a desk and digital multicore we'd subhired for them; I'd been working solidly since 8am and when I suggested at 2pm taking a short food and water break and coming back to it with fresh heads the response was a rather short and pointed 'we'll get the show up then eat' line. I see their logic, but having walked away from it for 15mins for a quick snack and a bottle of water I came back and solved it in 30 seconds. I suspect if I'd stayed there I'd have been no further on an hour later. There's a macho bravado that pervades, and it's not healthy. As a venue our rigger does top rigging and checks bottom rigging, and we check power; but it's hard to check everything a tour is doing, not least because you don't know what they're doing half the time and getting involved with the practised dance of the load in is a silly idea at best.

A colleague is attending this week, no doubt I'll get a run down when I next see them.

Oh yes, I understand the issue at hand. A good gasket sealed box, with a proper seal round the cable and cable entry position chosen to avoid the worst, and the antenna up high in the box so any collecting salt water remains at the bottom out of the way ought to at least slow the corrosion compared to open air.

A lightweight plastic housing ought to provide sufficient protection without causing significant attenuation of the wireless signal.

Be careful with GDPR and retention of data regarding the whereabouts of under 18s. One venue I know of is removing names of under 18s from sign in/out sheets, using some unique ID system to obfuscate the under 18s' name, as the sign in/out sheet is visible to others passing in/out of the venue. Not to say that a digital system is an inherent issue, pretty much every school uses digital registers, but that there is more opportunity for data to leak than a sheet of paper held til it is shredded.

The other production credits are: From Tim Routledges company facebook Plus Tom Young programming and operating. But not heard anything on sound.

You'll probably find something outputting composite video at that price (possibly something quite nice used on eBay as everyone is moving to digital formats), but I don't recall ever seeing any cameras that output to VGA.