Stuart91

A venue we worked with was being refurbished. Someone quite rightly brought up the issue of wheelchair access to their platform, and it was decided that a ramp would be built. The architect instructed the joiners to build something to the regs, I suspect around 1 in 12. What they ended up with stretched almost halfway into the audience area, and each section required four people to lift it. The platform was only 18 inches or so high. Somewhat predictably, the ramp was put into storage where it has remained ever since.

Which model of Jester are you using? Is it an ML (which has the wheels for moving light control)? Also when you say "fixture", what are actual lights? I'd usually think that fixture would imply an intelligent light of some kind (as opposed to a simpler generic lantern running from a dimmer channel). But terminology varies...

I bought some suspiciously cheap LED Pars a few years ago. They had cast metal casings, which looked as if they had rusted and been hastily painted over. Did make me wonder if the casings had just been sitting in a pile in a field before some enterprising person married them up with some cheap innards. To be fair, the casing looked fine from a few feet away and the handful we put into a very low-budget install have given stalwart service with no failures or niggles. The fans are a bit on the noisy side but that comes with the territory at this kind of price point.

I had something like that sprung on me at a wedding. Bride told us that they wanted "Stand by Me" for their first dance. No wifi, no phone reception, and they were already running late so looking to kick off immediately. We did have a laptop with some tunes, so I crossed my fingers and typed "Stand" into the search box. The only two results returned were "Can't stand me now" by the Libertines, and the theme from Grandstand. We felt that either would be a worthy alternative but the bride rejected both...

Most of my orders are similar size to yours, things like heat shrink, small tools, connectors, etc. For a good while now UK VAT has been added at the checkout so there hasn't been anything else to pay on my orders. If you have somehow managed to incur a fee it'll probably be the Post Office that try to recoup it before delivering.

I've had people playing tracks from WhatsApp and Facebook messages ("my pal sent me the songs")

Knowing this particular guy, it was more likely that he'd only mixed down the tracks that morning and had never used them in a proper PA before. (He'd turned up at previous shows with instruments that he'd literally bought on his way to the gig)

Not really (it was in the middle of a pretty fraught turnaround between bands). We just got him to reduce the overall level so that he wasn't hitting the internal compressor/limiter, and gained both channels up a little more at our end to compensate. What really took the time was his insistence that it couldn't possible be his iPad and our gear must be faulty... 🙄

I came across a related problem with someone using an iPad to send split tracks. They had click on one side and the track itself on the other. There seemed to be a linked compressor acting on both channels, and since the click was running very hot the track was ducking regularly. Took a bit of head-scratching to figure out what was going on.

Fair point. We've got a couple of interfaces that we use for anything critical. For this show I was running into an X32 rack, using a pair of Orchid DIs into the XLR inputs so no phantom issues. I did briefly try it into one of the aux inputs which are on jack connectors, and the problem seemed the same. Stuck with the XLRs so it would stay on the same layer as my mics. This might be it. They were using Windows Media Player (actually, just double-clicking on each file on the desktop, I assume it was WMP that opened by default, certainly looked like it). Didn't have the chance to try any other programs, I'll tell them to download something else and see if that helps in future.

This is an interesting idea - thanks. Certainly brief pauses in tracks were fine. The buzz tended to return a few moments after a track finished playing (so I had a split second to get to the mute button on the channel). I'm guessing that was down to silence on the end of the tracks. One other potential clue is that every time the headphone jack was plugged in, the computer threw up a dialogue asking what we had connected (headphones, speaker, etc.) and we selected headphone each time. I don't think I've seen that much before and wonder if it might be tied into the power saving techniques... Unfortunately we were very short of time (the client was more preoccupied with addressing the leaking roof in the venue, amongst other catastrophes...) so I didn't have much of a chance to do any troubleshooting. My preference would have been to just move all the files over onto my MacBook and run via QLab. As it was, they had some tracks coming off an iPhone (via lightning adaptor) and they played just fine, with no noise at all.

Didn't have the chance to run off battery - the owner said the battery was dodgy and I figured I'd rather cope with the buzz than have it die mid-show. I didn't catch the actual brand but it may well have been a Dell. Displaying my own prejudices, it looked cheap and plasticky and seemed to be running quite slow.

I was covering a fairly typical dance school festive show last night. They supplied their own laptop to play the tracks. When a track was playing, it sounded absolutely fine. But in between times, the headphone output was giving a loud buzz. It was louder than the tracks themselves, so gating wasn't an option. I didn't have time to do any serious troubleshooting so just had to be quick on the mute buttons as they started and stopped. I've encountered plenty of noisy laptops over the years, but never one that behaved like this. The noise only seemed to be coming from the headphone jack, there was nothing noticeable out of the internal speakers when the jack was unplugged. And it was gone completely when a track played - even when there was a silence during a track, no buzz was audible whereas it was blatantly obvious in between. I'd have liked to have tried a USB adaptor, but didn't have the chance. Wondering if it's an issue with the sound drivers, or something else? Anybody encountered similar problems?

My own "startup" experience was that I began playing in a band and covering gigs for friends at university, then grew very gradually from there. Many of the companies I'm friendly with began in similar circumstances. There is no way that you'd have wanted to put me in charge of a warehouse full of LED until I had a good few years experience under my belt. Some sort of merger with a fledgling company might work. This business is incredibly capital-intensive and you might be lucky to find someone with an established company that is struggling to make the jump to the next level. A combined entity would hopefully be worth more than the sum of its parts over time. Also just thinking about advertising - if your current recruiters aren't working, an advert in LSI magazine might get you in front of the right person.

I have a hunch that anyone with the capabilities you seek may already be running companies of their own... Could you partner with a local(ish) company that are already set up for the hire side? There might be some that would be happy to earn a margin or commission on jobs, whilst avoiding the capital spend or warehousing overheads. (The added bonus of course is that they gain a partner instead of a competitor)

In the UK, the HSE are on the record as saying they don't conduct testing on their own office equipment: From here To be fair, the tree will probably have a better emotional range than some of the turns I've worked with...

My first port of call would be the company who installed it (assuming you can track them down). Sometimes the weight rating is determined by the strength of the fixings (and the structure the fixings are into) rather than the bars and hardware themselves.

That's partly what's got me wondering about these ex-production M7s as a cheap option for theatres that need a lot of faders. Saw one on Facebook Marketplace yesterday for £1500, and it seemed to be in decent condition.

That's been my experience. We've had a couple of customers insist on getting a DPA or Sennheiser option. They sound good, but not ten times better than the cheapies. Whilst a bit more durable, they can still break. One AmDram near us was nearly bankrupted when their youngsters managed to, err... de-terminate a brace of hired-in DPA headsets and the supplier charged the full RRP as a replacement cost. You could check out Rode as an option - they're better than the cheapies but a bit more realistically priced. One of our church customers swears by them, they had a pastor with a troublesome voice and found the Rode handled it much better.

Good point Simon, hadn't realised that.

Actually, I tell a lie - it's only the M7CL-48ES model that has the built-in ports. The other (presumably more common) models have card slots like the LS9. Still, if you got a 48 input version it's only one card and stage box to add in order to get up to the 64-channel count.

I've noticed Yamaha MC7cl desks going for remarkably little money second-hand. They've got built-in Ethersound ports, so an upgrade might end up costing you less money than a pair of cards for your LS9 and eliminates some of the faff with head amp configuration?

There was a near-miss at Edinburgh Hogmanay in the mid-1990s. I was there as a punter and remember getting caught in a surge - very minor to what's just unfolded in Seoul but quite terrifying nonetheless. The following year (and every year since) the event was ticketed with entry to the area controlled. I imagine they'll need to instigate something similar in Seoul if there's a inherent bottleneck in the street layout.

Someone I know would bury instructions in his booking contract: "Send me an email with Discount as the subject line to get £50 off your invoice" Very few customers took him up on it, he reckoned it was worth the occasional £50 to know who hadn't read the contract fully.

With my first attempt, I was at least starting with something written for our industry, rather than a completely generic template. I'm pretty sure that 90%+ of the RMAs I write aren't actually read by the people I submit them to, just put on file somewhere and the requisite box ticked. I've always been tempted to slip in something outrageous (risk of Godzilla attack etc.) and see if anyone pulls me up on it.