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Stuart91

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Everything posted by Stuart91

  1. Fabory delivered on the Monday, and have actually taken the time to follow up on what would probably be a pretty small order for them. Overall I'm very impressed. The wing-screws themselves look identical to the ones I bought from Zoro previously, even down to the labels and packaging.
  2. LEDs are most effective (compared to conventionals) when producing saturated colours. And the nature of optics + LED sources means that wash fixtures are cheaper than profiles or fresnels. Depending on what kind of shows/bookings you are getting, it may make sense to use LED for your colour wash and keep the conventionals for face light and specials. (I'm thinking things like dance shows or panto where a lot of colour is required - covering the whole stage with a blue wash can tie up an awful lot of fresnels)
  3. Whilst I don't disagree with this at all, some mixers are sticky about the particular flavour of cable. (Shielded vs unshielded is the most common, but who know what'll come up in future) Many touring engineers won't trust in-house lines for this reason. Whilst installed lines will be great for your own use, it's helpful to have an easy route for cable runs. Things like hooks above doors can save a lot of time and gaff tape. (Whilst being safer in the event of a fire)
  4. An update - 4 months on. I bought another batch of deck last week, which came with a load of joiners that have the stock knurled Allen-head bolts. Went to buy from Zoro again, and the price for the length required has gone up 8x compared to my previous order. They were looking for £13.99 per piece. Emailed to query if the "new" price was a glitch on their website, but no, apparently their supply price has increased by a similar proportion. Meanwhile 60mm or 80mm are the same price as before. So for this next batch I've gone to Fabory, who despite being based on the continent seem to be confident that they'll get the shipment to me by Monday or Tuesday next week. We will see... Their price was approx £1.30 per piece so far closer to what I was expecting to pay.
  5. X32 definitely makes sense for bands etc. but maybe factor in a smaller/simpler analogue mixer for events with basic requirements.
  6. I ended up running a school Christmas show from a ui16 (with some trepidation) and was quite impressed. No obvious glitches or dropouts and I managed to do everything I wanted with it. However other people are clearly having issues with it, and Soundcraft have been gutted by their corporate overlords. Behringer's support isn't exactly legendary either, but they have a far larger user base and look like they will continue to release new products going forwards. HTML5 was an interesting way of handling the control. I found it OK, but realistically it's not that much of a problem to install an app, and in a church situation may prevent random people accessing the console (unless you keep tight control of logins) A relatively inexpensive (refurb?) tablet dedicated to running the app is probably the way to go. Tying up a laptop for desk control seems like overkill, and touch control makes the task much easier.
  7. I am perhaps showing my ignorance here, but would it be a possibility to use heatshield along with the acetate? (E.g. Lee 269) I appreciate it might soften the focus, I've only ever seen it used on wash lights.
  8. I was in a church hall not long after some unruly teenagers had been throwing icing sugar around. Unfortunately someone had tried to mop it up. The resulting sticky mess was apparently almost impossible to shift.
  9. I suspect there's more grip than standard ply when they're dry, but less when they're wet. My stock of decks includes both, and I certainly prefer the standard ply. If you're largely indoors then it's far less of a problem.
  10. We've used Edding 751 and have been quite happy with them. They've tended to have been used more for marking drapes etc. since we use stickers for cables. But they seem to stay on just about anything. https://cpc.farnell.com/edding/015713/silver-1-2mm-marker/dp/OE01221
  11. Hex is also quite slippery out of doors if that's an issue.
  12. As Tom says, the drawback with hex board is that it's much harder to touch up or repair afterwards. A gouge in standard ply can be filled, sanded and repainted. Which is a bit of a faff but certainly cheaper overall than fresh wood.
  13. This is what I ended up doing with some and it eventually worked. Was a complete PITA though, enough that I'd try to avoid Tourmate connections in future. I remember some exhibited a specialist tool at Plasa (possibly the last year it was at Earl's Court, so going back a bit). It looked neat but was quite expensive for one specific task.
  14. I agree that the connector is rubbish. If the unit is being permanently installed, it's possible to just wire the PSU in directly. That's what I did with an SX20 that did about 5yrs heavy service in a rack mount case without any problems.
  15. I was asked to quote to light a boxing show in a hotel ballroom. Priced it up using a bunch of nice LED cyc floods with barndoors, rigged from some bars in the ceiling. Never heard a thing back from the prospective customers. After the event I found photos on social media, and it turned out that they had bought some building site floods, complete with yellow tripod stands, and stuck one behind each corner of the ring. To be fair, the photos didn't look terrible, and as Adam says it would work OK if rigged from suitable positions. If there's more than minimal budget, I'd suggest using the 300w version and putting more of them up. More sources of light means the shadows are less obvious (especially on camera) and since the bulb life isn't spectacular you're less likely to have an obvious dark patch if one were to give up during the show.
  16. I've not covered many wrestling shows, but "random" is an accurate description. On the first event, one of the headline competitors rode a Harley into the room. Hadn't been so much as mentioned to us beforehand, first I knew of it was when I heard the engine fire up. I don't think the venue were very happy... On another event, the promoters brought a set of ladders for hanging their branding around the venue. They were then used for a "ladder bout" and got broken in the process. Cue much head-scratching at the end of the gig when they have to figure out how to get it all back down again.
  17. It may boil down to the conditions of the venue licence, rather than being "law of the land". There might be variance between councils/local authorities. (For example, for many years Edinburgh were really tight on electrical safety, whereas Glasgow ignored the electrics but were far more concerned about structural stuff. I always wondered if it was down to whatever accidents had occurred in each place back in the dim and distant past) I agree. I suppose you could argue that a fire is more likely to spread unchecked if the room is empty, but the chances of that initial ignition occurring are far greater with punters in. (Especially if they are idiotic/inebriated...) Plus, even if they did have an argument here, what happens for a multi-day event?
  18. We had some cheap and cheerful wireless DMX units that behaved as the OP describes. It was usually necessary to turn the transmitter on first, then the receivers. This became a bit of a problem if the transmitter was inadvertently powered down during a show, and you would need to cycle the receivers to regain control. Powering up in the order of transmitter, then receiver, then fixtures, might solve the problem. If the units intended as receivers see a DMX signal on the XLR, they automatically start transmitting which causes chaos. Ultimately the best solution (which is what we went for) was to replace the wireless DMX units. "Alien" branded ones are still very cheap and don't seem to suffer from the same problems.
  19. Hi Bruce, We bought one back in the autumn. (CQ12T) You're more than welcome to pop up and have a play with it at some point if that'd be helpful. I've not used it much myself, but I'd figured it will be a decent option for small talking-head style gigs where having things like dynamics and variable HPF is handy, but it's hard to justify taking something like an X32 Compact or SQ5. My one gripe so far is that it's not desperately quick to navigate, compared to say the SQ series. But that's a limitation of the form factor more than anything. I suppose it's more equivalent to something like the QSC TouchMix rather than being a cut-down SQ or QU. I don't think I'd like to do a fast-paced band gig with one, but for small function bands, ceilidh bands, and solo acts doing their own sound, it's a very good option. One other variable is that the excellent MixingStation is available for the CQ, which opens up other control possibilities. My plan is to get ours mounted in a briefcase with a small router so that it can get running with iPad control with minimum faff.
  20. In Glasgow, "football special" trains are still a thing when there are matches (and gigs) on at Hampden Park. (Train is by far the easiest method of public transport from the city centre) I'm sure there must be money to be made from running these services, or they'd have been cut long ago. Of course, packing supporters into trains like sardines is far more profitable that punters heading to a weekend festival with all their baggage.
  21. Hi Colin, I wonder if there's anything else could be interfering with the receivers which is turned on during the service, but not at other times? To give you one example, I had a church not too far from you with a Sennheiser G2 receiver which had begun dropping out consistently. It turned out that they had an HDMI splitter sitting directly underneath it, as soon as the splitter was turned off the problem went away. Something similar happened at an event where the customer had a Midas MR18 sitting on top of one of our RF racks. The PSU in the mixer was sitting directly beside the front-mounted twig antenna. Moving them apart by a foot or two was enough to make some problems disappear.
  22. We bought a batch of passive ZX1s when the model first came out, and the horns were cracked on most of them. They didn't seem to survive clumsy couriers. They were all replaced under warranty (and I was able to buy them back from a clearance sell-off a few weeks later, at a hefty discount!) Our solution was to wrap fibreglass around the horn to strengthen it, and add some hard foam behind to provide a bit of support for the magnet. The cabinets survived quite happily for many years after that. I think later revisions of the model were built a bit more sturdily from the get-go.
  23. Looks good, and well within our fabrication capabilities. 👍
  24. Tim is correct. The staff are using a phone app to connect to the Casambi units. In theory all the CasDMX modules should connect in a "mesh" arrangement but I suspect the range is too great, so they wander round each cluster setting colours in turn. The fixtures are all set to a DMX start address of one, so if the chain is working correctly everything responds together.
  25. Looks excellent. I don't suppose you know if the screw terminals are likely to accept the 1sqMM H07 flex that's been foolishly used in this installation?
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