J Pearce

I did similar with a pair of Patt123s, but dismantled the wifi bulb, hardwired the it in, and turned the LED PCB to face straight towards the lens. They go plenty bright enough to light up a room with a nice soft ambient wash, and with full RGB WW CW colour mixing. Probably 100-150W tungsten equivalent, but brighter in deep saturated colour. I've software limited the white chip brightness, as it was getting a bit too hot and was concerned about longevity.

There's a couple of uses for diversity receivers - the first is as you use them (and I often deploy in the same manner), the other main use case is spaced between a half and a full wavelength apart to eliminate dropouts due to multipath cancellations - when we had the latest Sony digital radio mics in on demo they were very keen for us to use 3/4 wavelength spacing to minimise the effects of multipath. There is also some discussion to be had about using 2 antenna with 1 horizontal and 1 vertical, though if you're particularly worried about polarisation then a helical antenna may be a better solution. Shure have some good articles discussing antenna spacing on their website.

Have you asked Chauvet? They have a very helpful service dept.

I think one aspect is that inflation tends to effect the price of lower value items more significantly than higher value items, as the margin is already tighter and a greater proportion of the price is costs like transport/import/storage/marketing/support etc. Mirrorballs take up quite a bit of space for a low value item so the manufacture price might not have changed much but the cost once landed in the UK is much higher. A similar rise in shipping on a moving light that's already £1k+ might not show up as significant in the pricing. I've not noticed 300% rises on sound kit (my last LX purchases were 2019), though some items might well be as high as 150% of 2019 prices.

QLab is very reasonably priced and has great tech support. If you can't afford that perhaps look at simpler tools like Multiplay. The real truth is not that none of us can afford to make our best work if we're not housed/fed/watered. Work deserves pay.

Daisy chaining 30 panels is unlikely to be ideal. As other experienced commenters have pointed out, you're almost certainly over 30mA of leakage current (you do have RCDs on this setup??), and you're likely over current for the power connectors (though as they're likely copies not made to any standard who knows what the limit is meant to be). I'd be looking for at least 2 power drops on 30 panels, but if working on a 3 phase supply I'd probably do 3 to keep it spread across phases. Drop a 32/3 (or 16/3) supply to each LED wall, then split each screen into 3 segments. Inrush current can be significant on LED walls as the capacitors in the SMPSUs charge up. The better units manage this with inrush limiting components, cheap ones your guess is as good as mine. Running on a generator you'll probably get voltage or frequency droop as they power up, but if you're only running kit with SMPSUs I suspect most of it won't care too much as long as the AVR doesn't overshoot as it recovers. On a stiffer supply you may pop breakers, but I'd usually overspec the supply to LED walls to accommodate inrush and the earth leakage of that many SMPSUs (hence that 32/3 to each wall).

QuinLED sell assembled WLED boards with fuses and voltage regulators etc. Their ESP32 board can be purchased with an ethernet board, which is better for SACN than wifi. I'd strongly recommend SACN over Artnet if possible.

Staging for performers only, or with public access? The former could be risk assessed to have less protection/steeper ramps etc. than would normally be provisioned for the latter. The ABTT Yellow Book is a good starting place. There will also be relevant British Standards. (I’m assuming you’re UK based)

35mm to scaff tube adapter - see Powerdrive's website, fit with scaff tube, hang lights from the tube. You will want good strong stands, not cheap speaker stands with plastic fittings. Windup stands are very useful in this scenario.

Are you trying to create realism, hyper-realism, or a stylised effect that will be read as TV even if it's not remotely realistic? I'd suggest you can't choose a solution til you know the answer to that question.

As someone who spent 6 years making theatre with 12-18 year olds: Set clear expectations - both safety and behaviour - it can be useful to explain why you've put specific rules in place, which can be as simple as "we all want to have a good time, so..." and "I'm here to help, so do ask questions, even if you think it's a silly one" (have a system for managing replying to 30 simultaneous questions - you will want a queueing system!) Think before you speak - ensure what you're about to say makes sense, if you have time consider how they might react to it. Have boundaries - both for safeguarding and for your own wellbeing. Be aware that your behaviour and mood will influence their's - use this to your advantage. You can energise them, calm them, focus them. For example signalling for quiet can work better than shouting over them. Similarly - model the behaviour/energy you want to see. Remember that they're kids. Still learning, full of hormones, confused by life. One day they might super confident and need winding in, the next day anxious about getting something wrong. Sometimes someone might need a minute of quiet time. Every kid is different. That's means if you're working more closely with any of them you'll want to learn what works best for each of them. You might need to move them around to find the job that excites them. Know your escalation route - if you can't handle a student/situation, who are you going to? Roll with it, and accept that it's a learning experience, not a professional show. Allow space for mistakes. Lastly, have fun! Most kids are utterly lovely, and they want to do well and have fun. Doing theatre can be a massive confidence and skills booster for kids, and hopefully it'll be a really important part of their year.

If you click through enough dialogs you eventually reach the service dept page which has the 'fixed price' repairs for all supported equipment. The cost increases with the age of the product (which doesn't seem unfair).

Normally the PSU provides line termination. You may need to disable line termination on all but one PSU or audio levels may be off and call buttons may behave erratically. Or use a 1:1 transformer to link only the partyline audio between the multiple racks.

It seems that The Real Thing are using Multiplay tonight (well, whenever it was recorded) on Jools' Hootenanny. Didn't manage to grab a screenshot, but the screen on the keyboard player's rig was definitely Multiplay.

We have a couple of the Denon DN-200BR units, and our rehearsal room racks are built round the Alesis Multimix 10 which also has bluetooth. I wouldn't plan to use either in a show, but for rehearsals, workshops, warmups, even a quick bit of test signal they are really great units. Rather than the old warmup fuss of getting them to connect, then unmuting, then muting before they disconnect etc, we just leave the rig in warmup state after power up and show dance-captain or SM how to pair to the bluetooth unit. I've not found anything that refuses to connect to the DN-200BR or Alesis units, and they've dramatically reduced our callouts to rehearsal rooms etc. If you can, spend the money on the right tool, rather than fussing around with the cheap ebay units.

They’re good bits of kit for many scenarios, but for me I’ll stick to a 3.5mm cable because I can leave out a 3.5mm adapter in a venue or rehearsal room and know it will service laptop or phone or tablet or iPod or… Because I don’t want to have to stock and hand out (and retrieve) USB-C etc. adaptors for a USB DI, nor deal with the inevitable strange device that won’t work with a standard class compliant device for unfathomable reasons. And lastly, because often I’m working to a spec from a designer or tour production manager, who has spec’d a 3.5mm and that’s what they expect to see. Adding a USB box would often create confusion/suspicion etc. and it would be my fault if it went wrong because it wasn’t to spec. However - if I did more corporate and ‘community’ gigs then those boxes would be in the toolbox. If it’s a proper job to my spec then a soundcard or one of our playback racks will be going in (or a macbook whose headphone outs always seem to be trustworthy), or alternatively one of our bluetooth receivers (which I’d usually avoid for show use due to compression and trusting a wireless connection - but is good for rehearsals and warmup etc.)

I'm transitioning our stock of mini-jack to XLRs to this sort of transformer isolated lead. They remove the risk of phantom being applied, they resolve grounding issues, and generally make things more reliable. We also have mini-jack to twin jack if going into a line level input or using a DI box (which probably sounds a bit nicer than the cheap transformers in those leads). We do have some class compliant USB soundcards in stock, but generally if I'm going to that effort I'll just move the files to one of our mac mini playback machines.

I've had no experience with W-Audio radio mics, but they're definitely at the budget end. They seem to tune only in C65 and C70 - do appraise how that works for licensing and frequency congestion where you are. I'd recommend sticking with good quality used kit. Plenty of G3 Sennheiser out there with lots of life left in it. Spare parts and expansion options (extra TXs etc.) are available, and most service/repair companies know the kit well. Similarly there's a fair bit of Shure's UHF-R kit knocking around the market. The caveat to that is that I doubt you'll find much in a quad receiver.

There's a big skills shortage at present, so anyone who can either already is, or has left the industry for better pay/conditions etc. As suggested above, finding a local company who want to hire out your kit as a subhire (B2B type arrangement) might be far more profitable than having to run your own enquiries team.

I could probably dig out a plan for something, but it'll just be a ground plan with some speakers drawn on, and some annotations as to what speakers on what circuits. Increasingly we're combining this info on to the main groundplan to allow for other depts to check clearances etc. I'd usually consider the schematic to be more of the documenting of all the surrounding data. For me this is usually a large excel file with multiple sheets. In past days the system schematic would be more akin to a circuit diagram, but this format is increasingly less helpful for big digital systems.

This language should ring alarm bells. ”Get away with” is not indicative of good safety planning. A good thought experiment is - what would I say in court if it went wrong.

There are a few boards available for upgrading 6ch dimmers. I’m not aware of a larger board for 24/48/72 ways.

That's quite a claim, and certainly not something I've found on any of the cables I've had from professional cable makers.

Pay someone to do it for you and concentrate on performing.

Worth noting that titanium dioxide is not considered food safe in some jurisdictions. I'd be doubly careful about any chemical sourced from eBay if there was a chance of it entering an actor's eyes/mouth etc.