J Pearce

There’s a very good chance that they could be. If you’re not confident in identifying asbestos cable you probably want to seek help (or dispose of responsibly).

Over the years I've done everything from schools to west end shows.

One of these 15W ESP8285 based LED bulbs gutted to its power module and LED PCB (retaining the heatsink part of the bulb housing), mounted on the lamp holder with some plastic bits and silicone adhesive. They run WLED so will listen to SACN over wifi - probably good enough for decor use, but not sure I'd want to use it for cued stage lighting due to latency over wifi. My use case is not work related, so I've not tried the SACN, but I'm led to believe WLED's SACN integration is pretty solid. You can't run the LEDs with RGB and both whites all at 100% without implementing forced air cooling, but with a bit of power limiting it's fine with passive cooling. You get a bit of flood/spot control, but not proper focussing as the source is so large. Brightness is 15W of LED, minus some losses through the lens etc. so not especially punchy, but for atmospheric or eye candy use, perhaps useful in work context.

I wouldn't attempt 12 channels with a budget system. It won't be reliable. Unless you're doing lots of shows a year, I'd suggest owning maybe 4 channels and hiring a good system when you need more. Additionally consider that budget systems are almost impossible to get spares for. By contrast I can still get spares for 10 year old Sennheiser packs, and they're mostly pretty easy to fit.

I’ve actually done this on a small low power scale on a pair of P123Bs, using the guts of a wifi LED RGBWW lamp (from Athom). The chip on board could run WLED and receive SACN or Artnet. The biggest issue is thermal management as LEDs need to run cool. I doubt you’d get good LED life out of anything much over 25W in a fitting designed for halogen lamps.

We've gone to digital networked comms in 2 of our venues - mostly due to needing more than 4 channels in production weeks and that becoming impractical on the extant analogue infrastructure, though our analogue setup was life expired, so it was a replacement as much as an upgrade. However, networked comms are vastly more expensive and vastly more complicated. GreenGo is good, but has a huge amount of user configurability - which can be both a blessing and a curse. After a period of hiring in various options, we settled on Clearcom Helixnet which felt better built and easier/faster to reconfigure as needed. To make either work you need someone with good computer network skills - including VLANs, broadcast domains etc. There's also Reidel and others if you want to get further down the rabbit hole. What do you need from a comms system? If you're doing rock and roll shout - then Glensound do some nice dante comms units, if you're doing theatre comms see above. But equally - if your analogue comms work well for you, what's the advantage of going to Dante? Cedd makes some good points about reliability and redundancy (for our Helixnet that's commercial switches on UPSs).

This was in a rather large establishment with corporate management chains, so the findings were reported up the chain - partly as a push to get a more specialist company in for our theatrical equipment.

Aside from arguments on what is required vs what is sensbile- in this specific instance, continuity testing extension leads was part of the agreed service level.

At a previous job where PAT was contracted out I always left a trap. It would be something that would fail PAT, but not be dangerous. As per your suggestion a missing fuse in an extension lead (so should fail on continuity) was a common one. They usually passed...

To go further down the rabbit hole - is a fitting setup with a plug-in ceiling rose hardwired or on a plug?

While I agree with much of what you say, venues with auditoria in the round come up with solutions for SL/SR on infrastructure labelling (N/S/E/W being the obvious, but there are other solutions).

Ampman repairs sorted my X32 rack when the PSU died.

If you can get at the part and measure the body and pins etc., you should find a suitable part, albeit maybe with a generic cap rather than the nice sennheiser one. The keyword for searches is “tactile switch”.

A quick google shows that the OP's Tannoy V12 have foam over the grilles.

To be clear, I'm talking about speaker grill foam (which I believe is what the OP is talking about), the discussion has since drifted across to cone surround foams. Yes, we keep a few rolls of thin and thick speaker grill foam in stock and replace grill foam as needed.

Speaker foam often disintegrates with age. Refoamed a load of our stock last summer, got more to do this summer. Not impossible that it's beetle/moth I guess, but it does also just fall apart into crumbs by itself.

I can think of a few potential approaches, all improved by flown speakers rather than on sticks. Are all the seats facing the stage in one line, or are you setup on 3 sides? If I were feeling fancy I might even be tempted by a split rig with one system for speech and another for music. (I often find a system designed for high intelligibility gives a lacklustre un-enveloping sound for music)

That's pretty neat, and I don't think it introduces any significant hazards - perhaps if overtightened the plastic could crack which unloads the halfcoupler which could open, but realistically with sensible use I can't see it being likely, and I'd hope safety bonds are in use in any case. Doughty make a commercial product for the same problem - http://www.doughty-engineering.co.uk/cgi-bin/trolleyed_public.cgi?action=showprod_T85850

Canford have a good range from Wharton (which I seem to remember is what is inside the Stage Electrics prompt desks). Might also be worth asking GDS if they could mount one of their clocks into a 1U or 2U plate. At the cheaper end I'd agree with Stuart91 - find a nice surface mounting unit and mount it on a panel. [edit to add] I've seen a few of these mounted in prompt desks (Symphony Hall and some ICC spaces), but not sure whether they have a UK dealer.

Aside from the risks of crossplugging, any cuelight system that runs LEDs at low voltage ought to be ok on CAT5/6/7 cabling. The older signal lamp units are probably too high a current. As Hippy has posted above there are some nice IP cuelight solutions, and a well designed network ought to work happily without need for frequent fault finding.

I'm a big fan of PZMs/boundary mics for general pickup. Usually an odd number to give me a mic DSC where actors often end up to say important things. I find I get a cleaner sound than from rifle/shotgun mics, and they're less obtrusive. Sitting them on a thin bit of foam can help with transmitted noise, but footsteps that are audible to the human ear will unsuprisingly also be picked up the mics. You'll want to fader chase to follow the active mic, or look at mic auto-mixers like the Dan Dugan stuff or the functionality built into Behringer/Midas mixers, which can work quite well at this sort of thing but can also get confused by noise that isn't dialogue. Simply throwing 5 mics live at 3dB off feedback isn't going to help you. It is also worth taking time to ensure a quiet stage, strong arm the lampies away from the latest blue LED mounted to a 747 turbofan, and persuade the carpenters to add extra bracing and deadening to any platforms to avoid resonance. Hanging mics work well for recording/relay etc. but are rarely useful for reinforcement unless you can get them to only just above head height, by which time you've usually upset 3 other departments.

You can run an external PSU with the Altair basestation if needed. You'll need to change the switch on the back of the Altair to 'slave' instead of 'master' so that only one of the PSUs has a termination in circuit.

By the time they've been posted, cleaned, repaired, retreated with fire retardant, and returned you may well be at the point of buying new ones. Repairs of anything larger than a very small tear rarely look good, especially in the twill fabric that schools usually end up with rather than serge. I'd talk to all the usual drape suppliers, JC Joel, Blackout, Whaleys, JD McDougalls etc. Or take an alternative approach and look at other industries who can handle large panels of fabric.

My biggest concern with specifying and installing this sort of thing is that if it doesn’t work/breaks and isn’t fixable you’re into a whole world of rewiring. At least 100V is a standard where you can change/upgrade various components and know they’ll work interchangeably. For the scenarios this product professes to be ideal, I suspect you’d be better served with distributed amplifiers with CAT6 between them, you could feed analogue audio (with DC power too) or network audio over the CAT6, and it’d be much better future-proofed. There are even POE speakers that work well for paging/BGM type work, and use a standard structured cabling that is easy to reuse/upgrade etc.

To follow up - I'm actually now advertising the Deputy post, as my previous excellent Deputy has taken up touring again. It's paid at £30,521.40, based on 39hrs a week annualised, with TMA outs paid as extras. The hourly is just over £15/hr.