phonic paa3 (how to use it)

[blackbeast250]

Hi folks,

 

I am a musician and not an engineer , so I do not have the knowledge and training that most of you have, however I would like to learn how to run my own pa correctly , and to this end I am thinking of buying (when I get my new system, see other post about , dynacord madras vs kv2)a phonic paa3, I saw this in the musistore.de catalogue, and downloaded the pdf manual and it seems simple enough to use , however the explanations in the manual assume that you are an engineer and are not eaisily understandable to me , all I really want to do is to come up with a system of being able to have my pa sounding great each night, regardless of the venue, my plan is to get a yamaha digital desk and have an engineer do a show for me and save the settings , and also to get him or her to programme my guitar and vocal effects and compressor, all I will have to do then is make sure the pa is calibrated correctly? is this fesible

? I understand that temp and atmospheric pressure make a difference but that aside would this idea work, and if so does anyone have any advice on , a. speaker placement b.using the paa3 simply? Sorry for the convoluted nature of the post in advance.

Robin.

[Simon Lewis]

Robin,

 

The PAA3 is fine as a basic real time analyser. This can help in setting up a system, but it cannot tell you when the sound was generated (i.e. is it direct sound from the loudspeaker, or delayed sound). It will measure reverb times, but your ears are actually quite good at telling you what the RT60 is!

Polarity checking (I very much doubt if the PAA actually measures "phase") is probably a one time check in a system that doesn't get reconfigured for every gig.

 

Overall, other than checking the level you are running the system at, such a device won't really help you, unless you have some understanding of what is happening from an electroacoustical viewpoint. I'd suggest a better course of action is to attend a sound system seminar.

Examples:

John Taylor - d&B Audiotechnik

Mark Payne - Sound Foundation Group

Soundcraft - Going Live

 

Some of these courses are free (they hope that you will remember them when you buy more gear!) and some cost a few hundred pounds. What they will do is give you an understanding of how sound behaves, how your system behaves, what you can measure and what can actually be changed.

 

If you can gain some understanding in these areas, you will soon work out whether a PAA3 is of any real use to you!

 

regards,

 

Simon

[blackbeast250]

Thanks simon, unfortunatly all these seminars are too far away for me , I am in the rep of ireland,really all I want to know is the basics of how to use a dual 31 band graphic , and weather my idea of using a digital mixer and having a good engineer program settings for me once is a runner , thanks .

[The Magus]

Temperature and pressure are the least of your problems! Don't even bother taking them into account in a small to medium venue.

 

If you're running a small system, and it is used as you state in your post simply for guitar (I assume acoustic) and vocals, then it is possible to self-engineer and produce a good sound. You don't need an RTA for this. Listen to music you know well (preferably a good recording of your band) through the system, and get used to what it sounds like. Use a 1/3 octave graphic eq patched into the master output insertion points of the mixer to equalise the speakers to the room. Avoid boosting frequencies - you're simply aiming to cut frequencies where there is a resonance in the room which produces an unpleasant sound, or which causes feedback. Don't cut any more than you need to, and bear in mind that the room will probably sound very different when it's full of people.

 

You cannot expect to store perfect mix presets on an O1V or any other mixer and produce the same sound from your PA every night in different venues. Significant variables will include the distance you sing from your mic, the angle of the mic, and the condition of your voice. Of course the more experienced you become the better will be your mic technique and the more consistent your voice. In fact once you get used to working in this way you will start to use your voice and mic technique to adjust the mix. You'll be aware also how much the sound of your guitar changes as the strings wear in and then wear out.

 

Presets will be a useful starting point - if you've set an eq that works with your voice going through a particular mic and particular set of speakers, then it will be a good approximation to what you need, however you will need to tweak!

 

Many groups operate successfully without an engineer. If you're simply putting vox / acoustic guitar / synths / backing tracks through a pa you should be fine. Think of the PA as a device to boost the sound of these instruments to compete with the electric guitars and drums. If you get to the stage where you're thinking about miking up drums and guitar cabs, you need an engineer! Working with a small PA and no engineer is very good for improving your musicianship. It means you have to listen to each other, and balance the sound among yourselves - just like the members of an acoustic group or chamber orchestra do all the time. There are too many 'proud to be loud' lads out there who think performing is about screwing the nuts off a marshall stack regardless of whether the vocal & other instruments can compete!

 

Good luck!

[blackbeast250]

hi Ben , and thank you for your reply, just to clarify a few points , it is just me with no band, and no backing tracks, just a vocal(always the same mic a shure beta87a) and always the same mic technique, the system will be 2 kv2 ex12s and 2 kv2 ex2.5s and a yamaha digital mixer with a klark teknik dn360 or 370, I always find that music played through a system on a cd sounds fine and I wouldnt know which frequencies to cut using this method, but as you say I really want to cut troublesome frequencies,one method I was shown was to keep turning up my mic and cut the frequencies that fed back as I went up, however the question I had about that method was , what about the guitar , would this not make the mic sound good and forget about the guitar? also I want to know what you do about the fact that there will be two speaker stacks, do they both have a different eq(surley they do seeing as they are in different places) and how do you address this , my guess would be that you turn one stack off and eq them one at a time using one channel of the equaliser for each stack , the method of turning up the mic and cutting accordingly sounds flawed to me , where as the pink noise thing makes more sense for a general system equalisation, its the mechanics of actually performing the operation that I havent got.

thanks Robin