Stuart91

There's a hotel I've worked in where a 5p piece works as an alternative to the lift key. Far quicker than trying to track somebody down. It seems to be common knowledge.

A local authority near me decided to offer their school facilities for outside rentals. It is all handled centrally, and the people in that office didn't always communicate bookings to the schools themselves. Cue me turning up with a vanload of kit. "What booking?" say the school when I arrive. Quick phone call to my customer to check I've got the right place. Turns out I do, but the central booking office hadn't told the school that their assembly hall would be getting used every evening that week.

Seems to be a regular problem with these machines, certainly all of the three that I owned died in this manner and I know others that went the same way. The pump itself doesn't look wildly different from these generic models but you'd be wise to double check the operating voltage etc. There have been a few threads on the subject over the years: https://www.blue-room.org.uk/topic/51200-antari-parts/ https://www.blue-room.org.uk/topic/64731-antari-low-smoke-machine/ https://www.blue-room.org.uk/topic/68116-antari-low-fog-pump-fault/ Looks like the control can be an issue as well as the pump itself. TBH the machines are a bit crap, I don't regret replacing ours and I'm not sure how much effort is justifiable with them.

School "management" gets worse when the building is being run by a private firm. We were setting up for a small outdoor concert in a school playground when the school "facility manager" tried to shut the gig down. His complaint was that power was being supplied from inside an adjacent classroom. (Direct quote: "I don't know how many volts you're pulling from that") The real beef was that his employers hadn't had the chance to quote for the job, and were missing out on the usual markup / backhander that they usually got from their chosen suppliers. The gig went ahead as planned - we simply called his bluff and offered to bring a generator. The teaching staff all seemed quite happy to see him lose the argument, apparently all sorts of supplies were getting pushed through the management company to the detriment of the school finances.

We had something similar happen some years ago. We were working with a charity who were setting up a community centre with a performance space. They had funding in place for a pretty generous installation that had been quoted and refined, just waiting on someone pushing the button to get going with it. Then they hit a last minute snag with the conveyancing of their building. Without that secured, the funders couldn't hand over the money. But the end of the financial year was approaching, and they had to spend it somehow. They essentially went knocking doors around the neighbourhood, and the local high school gratefully accepted a donation of ~£40k of kit. We then had to shoehorn the installation, with as few substitutions as possible, into a completely different venue.

Still working on it. AliStage looked very good but the price was way out of the ballpark. (Perfectly justifiable for their usual customers, just beyond ours) I see from your signature that you do Layher. I'd tried to make some enquiries with them but didn't get very far. Although again I suspect it might be too expensive. I'm considering getting something fabricated ourselves, the stumbling point is that we'd still have to use standard decking and need to find a way around the problem of lifting decks off. I liked Tom's suggested technique although our people would regularly only have two staff doing the build. Going to try it myself sometime - there are few things I dislike more than having to crawl around under a stage in a public park...

There are various CCTV standards (AHD, TVI and more) which can run full HD pictures down analogue cable. It's useful for retrofitting HD cameras to older installations, saves you having to run fresh cable. The connectors are the same BNCs as composite, but the signal is very different and incompatible. You can however get conversion boxes to HDMI (something like this) and some other models can produce composite if that's what you need. Might also be worth digging in the camera menu / settings as some are able to downgrade their output to composite SD. It's becoming rarer on newer models though.

I'm not a consultant, but have worked with some. Unless there's a clear spec for the job, decision-makers are usually left comparing apples and oranges. I've had quotes rejected only to find that the customer chose to go with a far cheaper option from someone else who hasn't understood the requirements and come up with a far inferior solution. (In one very satisfying instance the "cheap option" didn't work, so we ended up renting the customer equipment to get them by, and eventually were paid to do a fresh installation.) When 3 quotes doesn't work, it's often because of this kind of wild mismatch (with nobody knowledgeable enough to choose) or it's a stitch-up. I can usually tell when we've been asked in to provide the second or third quote to show due diligence when the preferred supplier has already been picked. Similarly, we've occasionally had customers ask us to suggest companies that would provide a quote that would make us look good, so they don't get any arguments from other committee members etc. It's flattering, but a little awkward...

How does this distinction apply to, say, a console hired for the tour, that the band engineer is carrying? It's been booked for that engineer's specific use, but it's obviously conceivable that if he fell ill, someone else would jump on to keep the show happening.

Here's a link to Sennheiser's frequency charts. The GB range is the one you want to look at - I've pasted it in as an image below. You won't get 16 into Ch38 itself, as you can see they spill over onto Ch39 and upwards. EW100 sets will tune to the full range, they just don't have built in presets beyond the first 12 so need to be tuned manually. If you want to stay within your licence, it's best to hire a set of four in either Ch70, or the space around 832MHz.

There's an old Avo desk on display in the factory that has a cigarette lighter built in, same as you'd find in a car. I suppose the modern equivalent would be charging your vape from a spare USB port.

When Kanye played Glastonbury, I was hoping incandescent pars would come back into vogue and my Parcan Graveyard would get some work again. Alas no, scrapped the last of them a while back.

I wonder why nobody has thought of putting a moving mirror onto the business end of a moving yoke? I imagine it'd be a bit of a head scratcher to operate, but it would give you fast movement with a much wider range of positional options.

Hell no. Go find an over-enthusiastic 19yr old, like I was at the time. (It was one of the first "proper gigs" that I worked, which is partly why it's stuck in my memory) Happy to supply the Zarges, and a brush and dustpan to collect the debris afterwards...

I can remember climbing a Zarges with a GoldenScan 3 in one hand. Not sure I could manage that these days...

The LED wall controller will have a brightness setting. It may be worth experimenting with this, there is probably a balance to be struck where the black level is low enough but the actual material isn't too dim. One venue that I work in from time to time end up running their wall at 5% brightness after dark.

My Bluetooth-related woe: some TVs now use bluetooth for their remote controls. Sharp were an early adopter. I fitted four in a venue, only to discover that the maximum number of remotes that could co-exist was two...

If you've tried a new lamp, and the projector still isn't working, I'd say it's a write-off at this point. According to ProjectorCentral this model was discontinued over ten years ago, so any replacement components etc. will be increasingly hard to come by. Sanyo's projector operation merged into Panasonic so there's not even a first point of contact for service. A brand new Epson machine with similar specs and a full warranty is retailing for £425 so throwing any money at a repair seems like a false economy to me.

That's a dying idea. A lot of desks now have just XLRs that get padded down for line input. Agreed - although most desks that have only global phantom will have separate jack sockets. Jon, how have you got on with Bluetooth DIs? I've been wary of relying on Bluetooth in anything approaching a production environment, but it might be an easy solution to dance teachers etc. turning up. (I'm fed up with my Lightning adaptors all going walkies...)

As Jon says, my concern was with the 48v taking out a headphone output if connected directly - the DI box will provide the isolation that the OP needs and also produces a balanced signal which is better suited to the longer run to FOH. My experience with Sennheiser Evolution receivers is that G2 and later seem to cope fine with phantom applied. If G1 receivers were connected to phantom (typically with jack to XLR adaptors in order to run up a multicore) they wouldn't behave nicely, but wouldn't break. Lifting pin one on the XLRs gets around the problem (as long as it's a balanced TRS jack into the receiver). Far neater to use XLR to jack adaptors at the desk end too, and bring them in a line input.

Something like this should do the trick. If the desk has "global phantom" (i.e. every XLR has phantom, rather than a switch per input) you need to be careful that nobody plugs in a minijack to XLR adaptor cable - it will take something out.

I'm a novice when it comes to the send / receive cards, however it appears that the wall can organise itself, we've had to take it down a couple of times and the pieces have been rearranged in more or less random order with no ill effects. Well, given that I've been called into this place because somebody can't plug in an HDMI cable... I'm quite happy to leave it running if that makes sense, just wanting to make sure I'm not leaving them open to bigger and more expensive problems appearing a little earlier than would otherwise be the case.

One of the venues that I work in has an LED wall. There's a bit of debate about how best to handle the power to it. My normal instinct is to power it down when not in use - I figure it's silly to add runtime to things like fans, and I've no idea what effect there is on the LEDs themselves. "Black" is clearly not the same as "off" even at minimum brightness. However, there's apparently an instruction from the supplier that the wall should be left powered up 24/7. I'm not sure what the reasoning for this could be. Are they worried about PSUs dying on power-up? The wall clearly isn't IP rated. The brand name doesn't show up on Google, and the power inlets and outlets are both blue coloured Powercon connectors. (To give a rough approximation of the quality here) It didn't come direct from China, but through a UK supplier who appear to do a mixture of rental and sales. My experience of different LED models is quite limited. Does anyone else know if the 24/7 power is a standard procedure?

Similar to HDMI...

Looks like the IDXpert machines are discontinued now, but Brady have some newer models available. One manufacturer that's off my shortlist is Dymo, who seem to be adding DRM to tie customers into using only their labels.