Stuart91

How is anyone supposed to run a business if rules like this flip-flop on a weekly basis? There's been plenty of comment from some areas of the political landscape about the low productivity of the UK force. That should hardly be surprising if management time is getting eaten away by this sort of thing.

I kinda fell foul of that when we were starting out. (Early 2000s) Landed a bigger gig that we were used to, and had to provide an RA to the venue for the first time. So I got one from a bigger company that we were friendly with. Tweaked it to suit what we were doing and handed it on to our customer. Customer handed it to their contact at the venue. It turned out he had written the original document for that other company in his previous employment there. Our customer, quick as a flash, said "Ah, at least we know they're following best practice!"

That would certainly be the case in a "dark start" scenario. But in a more controlled situation, I wonder how large the area of each "load group" is. It could be that normal service resumes a block or two away. (Also, are street lamps included in the load groups?) What's potentially more worrying for venues, is punters being unwilling to buy tickets if they reckon there's a chance a blackout will derail their evening. (Whether it's a planned outage or unplanned)

Assuming that the ale hasn't frozen solid in the meantime.

I was in a venue when all the power was cut, so that an electrician could wire in a temporary supply. In an 800-seat room, a phone torch would have been more use than the emergency lights. They did at least indicate where the exits were, but people would have been stumbling in the pitch dark to get to them. Then a few minutes later it died completely. The central battery seemingly hadn't been maintained since the building was constructed ~20 yrs earlier.

Is there a point where it becomes prudent / justifiable to have a backup generator on hand? A call centre near me has one sitting, I think it's been there since the building went up. Presumably someone did a risk assessment and figured that it was worth the spend, rather than lose the ability to service their customers. (As far as I'm aware there's nothing critical like a 999 switchboard in there) Cost of generator + changeover circuitry + fuel, set against the losses of having to refund a full house?

The world has gone truly mad if a funfair is allowed to use red diesel but a hospital isn't.

And here we are... National Grid say 3hr power cuts in a "worst case" scenario. It's obviously a reasonable possibility if people are opting to take a PR hit now in order to alert people. As a long-time reader of Private Eye, it's interesting to see some of their warnings come to pass...

That's a useful read, thanks. This bit seems relevant to our discussion:

My impression was that this was an intentional move by the authorities, to preserve bandwidth for emergency services?

In an ideal world they'd hopefully look at their sales figures and realise there's more money to be had with original designs than blatant knock-offs, but I can understand where you're coming from. What really sticks in my throat is when knock-off amps are rebadged and sold with a Union Jack and some waffle about British sound...

What I've sometimes done is kept a small notepad-style mixer accessible for the non-technical users, whilst providing either an easy changeover when the main desk is in play, or simply combining the two sets of outputs before the amplifiers. It becomes a little more complicated if you're needing to feed a loop amp / recorders / lobby speakers etc. at the same time.

Good point. I'm happy enough making some alterations to flightcases. Adding some rear support is fine, extending it by six inches so that I can fit a Powersoft would be a bit beyond my abilities. (There was a range of Carlsbo amps in the late 1990s that had quite sketchy build quality. A friend of mine mounted two into a rack case that rolled on its back. He got to the first gig to find that whilst the front panels were still firmly bolted in, the rest of both amplifiers had come away completely and was now rattling around in the bottom of the case...)

I do wonder how this service would work if every smartphone user is trying to use it at the same time (as they might be in an emergency situation in an urban area) If the service is constrained to calls to emergency services that might help keep the demand manageable.

One other minor drawback with Powersoft is that most of their models, despite being only 1U, are very deep. Probably too deep for the case I've got set aside for this project alas.

Used is potentially an option, but I don't really have time to wait for the right thing to come up. I've got a couple of Powersoft amps already and definitely rate them - they've been in weekly use for over 10 yrs without missing a beat. I did have a bad time with a second-hand one that I bought around the same time. It had a persistent fault that couldn't be fixed despite two attempts. I take the point about fakes, I'm not a fan of the practice and some on the Sinbosen site are pretty blatant. Maybe I'm missing it, but the amp Ceed recommended doesn't seem to have been knocked off from a recognised design. Some manufacturers start by imitating others and move on to genuinely innovate themselves, Behringer are probably the most prominent example of this.

The Pulse model could have fit the bill but I can't wait until January - it's a decent price for the spec though. The other too are a bit light on power, annoyingly would be fine for about 80% of the jobs, but will fall short for some. Sinbosen look interesting. A lot of their designs are quite "familiar" but the 1U options seem decent. For this job, I'm hoping to get something that will arrive in days, rather than weeks - but might buy a couple anyway for general hire stock.

They look like they could fit the bill. (Particularly the model without DSP, as the X32 will do anything required) Funnily enough, I'd had a search of the Thomann site yesterday but didn't see those models.

Alas, no. (It seems to be almost £3k) Nice looking unit though.

I'm currently trying to put a small rack together, which is going to have an X32 Rack, together with a router and some radio mic receivers. The idea is that it's an all-in-one solution for smaller events. Last part of the puzzle is some amplifiers. I'd had my eye on Blue Aran's JAM Q3 which is 4x500w into a 4 ohm load, whilst being only 1U in height. Unfortunately they're out of stock, with no ETA available, which probably means many months' wait. I've been looking for alternatives. The DAP QI-4600 seems to be almost identical but is similarly unavailable with no lead time given. I'm really keen to get 1U, as otherwise I'm going to have to replace the rack itself with a bigger one - at the moment it's 6U and jumping up to 8U will impact the portability quite a bit. However I can't justify the cost of Powersoft etc. so need to keep to the budget end of the market. I could compromise a little on the power output as it'll mainly be driving small monitors. I'm not seeing much available online, can anyone point me towards models that I might have missed?

Interesting to note that they will do a maximum a drop of 12ft. We did two that were 18ft tall (an 8x6ft viewing surface and 12ft of blank space above). I believe they needed a custom screen casing built - essentially a shortened version of the casing for a far wider screen to accommodate the amount of fabric that needed to go on the roller.

Please do - I have a bunch of stands in similar condition that could do with some TLC.

I put a couple of these designs into installations. We had them manufactured by ECT, but I think they stopped offering them altogether. The key difficulty is avoiding the edges of the fabric curling in, so "tab tensioning" is a must. We also had a "Smart Move" screen that failed badly. Chewed its own hanging wires despite them being rigged perfectly straight. I've been very wary of them ever since.

Not directly related to your question, but it might be worth looking into stair-climbing parcel trucks etc. No point in hand balling stuff any further than you have to.

That was my recent experience with QSC service. They wanted to replace the entire PCB, at a total cost greater than the replacement cost of the amplifier.