Tag Archives: Gear

When The Control Surface Fails

You may have to reboot – or you might not want to.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

Back in “the day,” we got wind of an exciting development: Consoles now existed that had a measure of independence between the actual audio processing and the control system. If the controls – the “surface” – had a problem, you could restart the surface without interrupting your show. Neat!

Of course, only the big boys and girls had access to this. I still have in my possession a pair of digital consoles that do not allow that kind of behavior. When they were newly built, the asking price per each was $3000. Nowadays, you can swipe a card for $450 and get the DSP part of a digital console equation that’s noticeably better.

These new, mini-consoles are designed to connect to a tablet or computer via a network, presenting a virtual surface through the external device. The convenient and fast way to do this is over WiFi, and it’s great when it’s really working…but it’s not so great when something goes amiss. (To be brutally frank, it’s another case of “It takes a pretty darn spendy wireless unit to be as good as a $5 cable.”) The console keeps charging along, passing audio without a hitch. You, on the other hand, are sitting there, somewhat alarmed that your display is freezing and lagging like a Tenderfoot Boy Scout on his first cold-weather hike.

So, what do you do?

Well, first, I would urge you to remember that disrupting a show or event is the last thing you want to do. Second, you need to keep in mind that some control is better than no control at all. Third, having no control at a critical moment will disrupt the show. (You see, Simba, we are all connected in the great circle of…mic cables…no…loading in and out…no, that’s not it…)

Anyway.

The point is that if you reboot your surface, or the WiFi module that communicates with it, you are no longer a “pilot in command.” Instead, you’re a pilot strapped to a jet that is going to do whatever it was last told to do, come hell or high water. That might be a good thing; A right thing. It might also be the wrong thing, or a thing that’s so horrifically bad that you want to hide your eyes and run for an exit. In whatever state you are, you are going to be stuck until the surface or network is back up. How long will that take? A few seconds? A minute? Several minutes?

You may not be able to be sure.

If the problem is degrading your control, but not completely preventing it, keep what control you have. Only reboot if you actually lose control, and that’s what you need to do to return to the driver’s seat. If it looks like you’ll soon be forced to let the system drive itself for a bit, try to use what influence you have left to make your mix stable and accommodating of coming changes. Open all channels that might need to be un-muted in the next while, and pull your output masters down a bit to guard against feedback.

Otherwise, just let the situation ride. Things might be clumsy and disconcerting, but you’ll be able to get through.

And have an alternative control connection available if at all possible. Like something that uses a $5 cable.


Monitor-World Is Not A Junior-Level Position

Mixing monitors is a mission-critical task, not an “add-on” to FOH.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

Worrying about Front Of House (FOH) doesn’t keep me up at night. Monitor-world, on the other hand…

It’s not just because an issue at FOH is much easier to hear, and thus much easier to correct swiftly and in detail. (Although that’s part of it.) It’s not just because midstream communication regarding monitor needs is difficult – exponentially so as the detail-level of a request rises. (Although that’s part of it, too.)

It’s because getting the monitors right is absolutely crucial to a successful show. If monitor-world isn’t doing its best, the musicians won’t be able to do their best, and if they can’t do their best, the most stupenfuciously awesome-sauce FOH mix will be a mix of musicians WHO ARE STRUGGLING. I don’t want to be forced to choose, but if I am compelled, I will take incredible monitors and mediocre FOH without hesitation.

Every day of the week.

And twice on Sunday.

Yet, for some reason, there has been a tendency to elevate the FOH audio human’s position above that of the monitor engineer. It’s as if there are two species of noise louderizer in the world, Homo Sapiens Mixus Audienceus and Homo Sapiens Musicius Keepem-Happyus, with the latter being an underdeveloped version of the former. Well, that’s a load of droppings from an angry, male cow if ever there was such a thing.

For FOH, you basically mix one show, a show that, as I mentioned, you yourself hear in detail. You generally get to make decisions unilaterally, and your path to those decisions is through your own interpretation of your hearing.

In contrast, monitor-world is the mixing of many shows to multiple audiences of one (sometimes eight or more). Those shows may have wildly different needs, and with wedges, each show bleeds into and heavily influences all the other shows. There may be a subtle detail that’s driving somebody crazy which is difficult for the operator to hear. Every significant choice has to filtered through the interpretation of another person, and nuanced communication is anywhere from challenging to outright impossible. At any given moment, you have to keep some sort of mental map about what’s going where, and also about what was recently changed (in case a problem suddenly crops up). Modifications have to be made swiftly and smoothly, and if you make a mistake, you have to be able to backtrack surgically. Panic is lethal.

To crib from The Barking Road Dog, mixing rock-and-roll monitors in realtime is not a skill possessed by a large number of people involved in the noise louderization profession.

…and then, there’s the gear side. It’s not uncommon to hear of a smaller audio provider upgrading a “point-and-shoot” FOH rig, with the old boxes being “demoted” to monitor duty. This sometimes happens by default or necessity. It’s certainly the reality in my case. But to do that intentionally doesn’t make sense to me. The boxes where being laser-flat across the audible spectrum helps stave off disaster? The boxes that have to stay “hospital clean” at high volume? The boxes that have to be able to produce large, uncompressed peaks, so that performers can “track” their own output? Those boxes are needed in monitor-land! (Seriously, if I ever get my hands on a bunch of disposable income, I’m going to bring my monitor rig UP to parity with my FOH system.)

So, no. Monitor-world is not for the intern or second-banana. The person running it is not a “junior” or “second” engineer. The gear is not the stuff that couldn’t cut the mustard at FOH.

What happens on deck is the bedrock, THE crucial and critical foundation for the show as a whole. It should be treated as such at all times.


Bring ‘Em If Ya Got ‘Em

It’s a Schwilly guest-post!

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

“If you have some sort of device that you can use to tweak the sound of your instrument, even if that’s just a bit of extra volume, you should definitely have that handy.”

Want to know why? Read the whole thing here, for free.


Basic Power Distro Pointers

It’s all about impedance – either to ground, or to the load.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

Power distribution is a huge subject in concert production, and there’s no way for me to truly do it justice here. Especially when you get into the electrical supply issues for big shows, the topic can get pretty hairy.

Of course, we’re talking about small shows, so that makes things easier. Even so, please be aware of two major points:

1) Handling electricity correctly is absolutely critical to life and safety. Don’t take anything I say and run off towards some sort of homebrew, half-baked solution that can get someone killed. Making something in your garage to fix one problem is very likely to expose you to some other – potentially lethal – problem.

In fact, there’s the first pointer for small-venue power distro: If you made it yourself and you’re not an actual electrician, it doesn’t belong in the mains-power chain. If you ARE an actual electrician, it still might not belong in the chain. If you can’t buy it in an assembled form from a reputable vendor, plugging it into the wall is probably a bad idea.

2) This is not some sort of exhaustive discussion about everything that can possibly go wrong (or right) with power. This is just a few points that I’ve found helpful over the years.

Impedance To Ground Should Be As Low As Possible

A valid connection to ground is imperative for safety. Removing or bypassing the ground connection to “get on with the show” creates a situation where the impedance to ground is effectively infinite. That’s a very, very, VERY bad thing. If you don’t have a reliable, permanently attached, and code-compliant connection to ground, there’s no reason to go any further. Keep your power disconnected until that problem is fixed.

Electricity is very reliable about following the path of least resistance to a 0-volt reference point, that is, “ground” or “earth.” Solid, low-impedance connections to ground are a kind of insurance against accidents. If, say, a piece of equipment suddenly suffers a fault where the case becomes “hot,” a sufficiently low-impedance connection to ground allows a large current to flow across the connected supply circuit. This doesn’t seem helpful, until you realize that large currents are what trip breakers. The (hopefully) enormous surge pops the breaker or blows the fuse, in an effort to prevent people from dying.

An unreliable or absent connection to ground means that YOU may suddenly be the path to ground with the lowest impedance. Such a condition may end poorly for you.

Impedance To Ground Should Be Equal For Everything

Actually getting this exactly right is pretty close to impossible, however, it’s something to consider if you’re having a stubborn hum or buzz problem.

The issue for us audio humans is that our gear all gets connected together in some way. Although this interconnection doesn’t directly involve mains power, the connections to the main power service are definitely a factor. If you’re in the very common situation of the mixing console and other control gear being powered from a different outlet (and, very possibly, a completely different circuit) than the gear “on deck,” different pieces of gear can have multiple paths to ground. If the available pathways have impedances that differ significantly, current can end up flowing back around the various electrical junctions involved.

(Buzzzzzzzz…)

Since good, low-impedance connections to ground are critical to safety, one solution to this conundrum is to maintain connectivity to ground while using the fewest outlets and circuits practicable. For instance, getting an offending device to use the same circuit as non-problematic devices may help. You have an even better chance if you can use the same outlet box. You must NOT overload an outlet or circuit in the process of trying to achieve quietude, however. Safety has to win all contests of priority. If safety requires that you use multiple outlets and circuits, and you end up with some noise, you just have to live with it.

Resistance To Load Should Be As Low As Possible

Wire has resistance. It may be very low, but it is definitely not zero. Resistance increases in proportion to wire length, and increases in inverse proportion to wire cross-section. In other words, 100 feet of high-gauge (thin) wire resists current more than 1 foot of low-gauge wire.

Resistance causes electrical power to be wasted as heat, and causes noticeable voltage drops across long runs of supply cable. Cable offering too much resistance for the application can overheat under heavy use. This can cause a short, or even a fire.

So, very simply, use the shortest length and lowest gauge of mains power cabling that you can. Keep in mind that everything you connect in series is adding to the length of your run; The 15-foot pigtail on that power-strip counts!

Also, remember that any power cord in direct connection to the wall MUST be rated to carry the entire load that might be present on that connection. “Branches” to individual devices down the line can use lighter-gauge cable, because that single cable doesn’t have to manage the full load on the circuit. The feed to those branches, including any power strip or multitap involved, must be capable of safely operating with the full wattage of the circuit flowing across it. (Speaking generally, “14/3” electrical cable is sufficient for most small-venue power distribution applications. Going down to 16/3 is fine for branching from a multitap, but avoid using that cable for the direct run from the wall.)

As I said, this isn’t everything there is to know about power distro. However, you might find these tips to useful as you go along.


Pre Or Post EQ?

Stop agonizing and just go with post to start.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

Want to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

Oh, the hand-wringing.

Should the audio-human take the pre-EQ split from the amplifier, or the post-EQ split? Isn’t there more control if we choose pre-EQ? If we choose incorrectly, will we ruin the show? HELP!

Actually, I shouldn’t be so dismissive. Shows are important to people – very important, actually – and so taking some time to chew on the many and various decisions involved is a sign of respect and maturity. If you’re actually stopping to think about this, “good on ya.”

What I will not stop rolling my eyes at, though, are live-sound techs who get their underwear mis-configured over not getting a pre-EQ feed from the bass/ keys/ guitar/ whatever. Folks, let’s take a breath. Getting a post-EQ signal is generally unlikely to sink any metaphorical ship, sailboat, or inflatable canoe that we happen to be paddling. In fact, I would say that we should tend to PREFER a post-EQ direct line. Really.

First of all, if this terminology sounds mysterious, it really isn’t. You almost certainly know that “pre” means “before” and “post” means “after.” If you’re deducing, then, that setting a line-out to “pre-EQ” gets you a signal from before the EQ happens, then you’re right. You’re also right in thinking that post-EQ splits happen after all the EQ tweaking has been applied to the signal.

And I think we should generally be comfortable with, and even gravitate toward getting our feed to the console from a point which has the EQ applied.

1) It’s consistent with lots of other things we do. Have you ever mic’ed a guitar amp? A drum? A vocalist? Of course you have. In all of those cases (and many others), you are effectively getting a post-EQ signal. Whether the tone controls are electronic, related to tuning, or just part of how someone sings, you are still subject to how those tonal choices are playing out. So, why are you willing to cut people the slack to make choices that affect your signal when it’s a mic that’s involved, but not a direct line?

2) There’s no reason to be afraid of letting people dial up an overall sound that they want. In fact, if it makes it easier on you, the audio-human, why would that be a bad thing? I’ve been in situations where a player was trying desperately to get their monitor mix to sound right, but was having to fight with an unfamiliar set of tone controls (a parametric EQ) through an engineer. It very well might have gone much faster to just have given the musician a good amount of level through their send, and then let them turn their own rig’s knobs until they felt happy. You can do that with a post-EQ line.

3) Along the same track, what if the player changes their EQ from song to song? What if there are FX going in and out that appear at the post-EQ split, but not from the pre-EQ option? Why throw all that work out the window, just to have “more control” at the console? That sounds like a huge waste of time and effort to me.

4) In any venue of even somewhat reasonable size, having pre-EQ control over the sound from an amplifier doesn’t mean as much as you think it might. If the player does call up a completely horrific, pants-wettingly terrible tone, the chances are that the amplifier is going to be making a LOT of that odious racket anyway. If the music is even somewhat loud, using your sweetly-tweaked, pre-EQ signal to blast over the caterwauling will just be overwhelming to the audience.

Ladies and gents, as I say over and over, we don’t have to fix everything – especially not by default. If we have the option, let’s trust the musicians and go post-EQ as our first attempt. If things turn out badly, toggling the switch takes seconds. (And even taking the other option might not be enough to fix things, so take some deep breaths.) If things go well, we get to ride the momentum of what the players are doing instead of swimming upstream. I say that’s a win.


A Monitor Layout For A Rock Show

Sometimes you’re thinking about audio, and sometimes not.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

monitorsWant to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

The picture attached to this article is an important reference point for the text. What you’re looking at is a scale drawing of the stage and monitor rig for the Sons Of Nothing: Clarity 10th Anniversary show.

So…why did it all end up like that?

The first thing that drives monitor placement is the stage layout – or, more precisely, where the actual players are going to be. In general, what we want to do with wedges comes down to one, simple rule: We want the loudspeaker output to hit whoever is supposed to be listening to it, while hitting as little of anything else as possible.

Of course, that rule gets bent (or simply taken outside and used for target practice with heavy artillery and wiffle bats) for various reasons, but it’s the starting point.

Down front, the plan was to have up to three people in play at any given moment. A guitarist downstage right, a solo vocal or solo guitar downstage right center, and a bassist parked down center. The down left riser was a dedicated space for a separate “keys and guitar” world. Center right was to be the land of woodwinds.

Upstage was split because of a need to run video. Sons Of Nothing uses projection as a key part of the concert, and in this case, front-projection was the order of the day. That meant that we needed a clear shot for the projector to fire “through” the band and onto the back wall. To get that open space, we put the drum riser off to the stage right side, and the backup-vocal riser went the opposite way.

Now, with the rule that I stated above, the natural inclination would be to always get a loudspeaker delivering a foldback mix as close to the players as could be physically managed. That’s not a bad rule of thumb. In fact, that’s a huge advantage of in-ears; You get to put the monitors so close to the player that they are partially inside their head, and only deliver usable output to that musician.

But an important realization is that live-sound is not actually about the best sound, as divorced from everything else. Rather, what we’re trying to do is create the best show, which is a holistic exercise.

Hence, the three downstage wedges were set on the floor, rather than up on the deck. The difference in distance was negligible, but a couple of very nice advantages were gained. Advantage 1 was that the loudspeakers no longer had as much physical contact with the riser, so they didn’t transfer as much vibration to the stage. Advantage 2 was that rather more of the main riser was available for actual people and the things they need to have to play well – like guitar-effect pedal boards.

A natural tendency is to set a player’s wedge such that it’s centered in front of them. In most circumstances, this is a reasonable idea. With a mono mix, most people like getting the output into both ears equally. There’s a problem, though, when keyboards enter into the equation. Physically, they’re pretty big and solid, and thus are very good at blocking the oh-so-critical “intelligibility frequencies” from a loudspeaker. Plus, keyboards can’t hear. It’s waste of output to fire a wedge into the bottom of a keys setup.

That’s why the keys wedge is off to the side. That placement allowed the sound from the drivers to have a clearer path to an actual human ear. A big help with making that placement work was the use of supercardioid-pattern microphones. Their pickup null points are at an angle to the rear of the mic (rather than straight back) and they have a tighter pattern in general. That helps significantly in being able to get enough output from a box that’s coming in from a diagonal. (With supercardioids and a monitor directly in front of the player, having the mic parallel with the floor helps to get that wedge firing into the least sensitive areas of the pattern.)

I would have liked to have put the keys wedge on the floor, but I was worried that the necessary distance for a good angle would be too much of a tradeoff.

Talking about the upstage folks, it might seem a bit weird that the backup-vocal wedge was set so that the riser partially blocked its output. There is an explanation though. First, I was concerned about chewing up real-estate on that platform, because there wasn’t much to go around. Second, some blockage from the riser was actually helpful. Plenty of sound that needed to get to the vocalists’ ears could still get there, with “splash” from the back wall mostly heading up into the acoustically treated ceiling. If the wedge had been up on the riser with the singers, there would have been a lot more spatter in general, and a lot of those reflections might have headed directly for the vocal mic in keyboard land.

The drumfill was an exercise in compromise. From a purely audio-centric perspective, it would probably have been best to to put things on the stage-left side of the drummer, with the full-range wedge off the sub and pointed upwards. The backup vocalists wouldn’t get blasted with the drummer’s monitor mix, and excess spill would go up into the ceiling. Unfortunately, logistics got in the way of this. Most of the square-footage on the drum riser was needed for…you know…drums, and so the “idealized” drumfill setup was too greedy for space. It also would have made it very hard, or maybe even impossible for the percussionist to enter from stage left as was planned. Stacking the drumfill on the left would have blocked the video.

So, a tall stack on the up-right corner was the solution.

One bit that I haven’t yet discussed is that lonely subwoofer that’s just upstage of center. What the heck is that?

Well, remember that down-center was the bass-player’s territory. As an additional wrinkle, no bass backline was brought in, except for a wireless rig. Such being the case, we needed to ensure that adequate low-end was produced for the folks on stage. Sonically, it would have been better to push the subwoofer downstage a bit (to reduce the time-arrival difference between the low-frequency information and everything else), but it seemed more important overall that it just not be in the way. So, I set the box flush with the drum riser, dialed the internal crossover for about 90 – 100 Hz, pulled the high-pass output to the down-center wedge, and the bassist ended up with a triamped monitor rig that could make some rumble without being run hard.

As far as I could tell, the overall setup was a success. Now, if only the woodwinds monitor hadn’t become unplugged at an unhelpful time…


How To Buy A Microphone For Live Performance

A guest-post for Schwilly Family Musicians

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

vintage_microphone-wallpaper-1280x800

From the article: “At the same time, though, a LOT of mics that are great for recording are a giant ball of trouble for live audio. Sure, they sound perfect when you’re in a vocal booth with headphones on, but that’s at least one whole universe removed from the brutal world of concert sound. They’re too fragile, too finicky, too heavy, their pickup patterns are too wide, and you can’t get close enough to them to leverage your vocal power.”

The whole thing is available for free, so go ahead and take a gander.


How Much Light For Your Dollar?

Measurements and observations regarding a handful of relatively inexpensive LED PARs.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

box_of_lightsWant to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

I’m in the process of getting ready for a pretty special show. The album “Clarity” by Sons Of Nothing is turning 10, and a number of us are trying to put together one smasher of a party.

Of course, that means video.

And our master of all things videographic is concerned about having enough light. We can’t have anybody in the band who’s permanently stuck in “shadow.” You only get one chance to shoot a 10th anniversary concert, and we want to get it right.

As such, I’m looking at how to beef up my available lighting instruments. It’s been a long while since I’ve truly gone shopping for that old mainstay of small-venue lighting, the LED wash PAR, but I do take a look around every so often. There’s a lot to see, and most of it isn’t very well documented. Lighting manufacturers love to tell you how many diodes are in a luminaire, and they also like to tell you how much power the thing consumes, but there appears to be something of an allergy to coughing up output numbers.

Lux, that is. Lumens per square meter. The actual effectiveness of a light at…you know…LIGHTING things.

So, I thought to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be interesting to buy some inexpensive lights and make an attempt at some objective measurement?”

I agreed with myself. I especially agreed because Android 4.4 devices can run a cool little Google App called “Science Journal.” The software translates the output from a phone’s ambient light sensor into units of lux. For free (plus the cost of the phone, of course). Neat!

I got onto Amazon, found myself a lighting brand (GBGS) that had numerous fixtures available for fulfillment by Amazon, and spent a few dollars. The reason for choosing fulfillment from Amazon basically comes down to this: I wanted to avoid dealing with an unknown in terms of shipping time. Small vendors can sometimes take a while to pack and ship an order. Amazon, on the other hand, is fast.

The Experiment

Step 1: Find a hallway that can be made as dark as possible – ideally, dark enough that a light meter registers 0 lux.

Step 2: At one end, put the light meter on a stand. (A mic stand with a friction clip is actually pretty good at holding a smartphone, by the way.)

Step 3: At the other end, situate a lighting stand with the “fixture under test” clamped firmly to that stand.

Step 4: Measure the distance from the lighting stand to the light meter position. (In my case, the distance was 19 feet.)

Step 5: Darken the hallway.

Step 6: Set the fixture under test to maximum output using a DMX controller.

Step 7: Allow the fixture to operate at full power for roughly 10 minutes, in case light output is reduced as the fixture’s heat increases.

Step 8: Ensure the fixture under test is aimed directly at the light meter.

Step 9: Note the value indicated by the meter.

Important Notes

A relatively long distance between the light and the meter is recommended. This is so that any positioning variance introduced by placing and replacing either the lights or the meter has a reduced effect. At close range, a small variance in distance can skew a measurement noticeably. At longer distances, that same variance value has almost no effect. A four-inch length difference at 19 feet is about a 2% error, whereas that same length differential at 3 feet is an 11% error.

It’s important to note that the hallway used for the measurement had white walls. This may have pushed the readings higher, as – similarly to audio – energy that would otherwise be lost to absorption is re-emitted and potentially measurable.

It was somewhat difficult to get a “steady” measurement using the phone as a meter. As such, I have estimated lux readings that are slightly lower than the peak numbers I observed.

These fixtures may or may not be suitable for your application. These tests cannot meaningfully speak to durability, reliability, acceptability in a given setting, and so on.

The calculation for 1 meter lux was as follows:

19′ = 5.7912 m

5.7912 = 2^2.53 (2.53 doublings of distance from 1m)

Assumed inverse square law for intensity; For each doubling of distance, intensity quadruples.

Multiply 19′ lux by 4^2.53 (33.53)

Calculated 1 meter lux values are just that – calculated. LED PAR lights are not a point-source of light, and so do not behave like one. It requires a certain distance from the fixture for all the emitters to combine and appear as though they are a single source of light.

The Data

The data display requires Javascript to work. I’m sorry about that – I personally dislike it when sites can’t display content without Javascript. However, for the moment I’m backed into a corner by the way that WordPress works with PHP, so Javascript it is.

Ascending sort by:


Loud, Low, Little

You may pick two, maximum.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

speakerwallWant to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

Most of you have probably heard the old chestnut, “Good, fast, cheap. You may pick two of the three.” The saying is an “iron law” of project management.

There’s a very similar law when it comes to loudspeakers:

A loudspeaker might be inherently efficient (Loud), it might reproduce useful low-frequency information (Low), and it might be compact in size (Little). You can’t get more than two of those things to happen at once.

By way of example, let’s take a gander at the high-frequency horn section in your typical, full-range, live-sound box. In all likelihood, it produces quite a bit of SPL with not very much power – lots of affordable, high-frequency compression drivers won’t handle more than 50 watts of continuous input. Heck, some can barely manage 20! The driver is quite small, especially when compared to a 12″ or 15″ cone.

Loud and little is 100% within that driver’s wheelhouse, but it won’t go low. If it did, there wouldn’t be a low-frequency driver in the cabinet. To prevent that itty-bitty compression driver from being wrecked, a high-pass crossover filter is needed. The corner frequency of that filter might be up at 2.5 kHz or so. There’s nobody on Earth who would confuse the high-midrange/ high-frequency transition zone for “lows.”

The above is fairly intuitive for most, but it can be a bit easier to get bamboozled when you see a big driver. An 18″ driver must be able to make really low-frequency material at high volume, right? Well…maybe. The box that driver is sitting in is a HUGE part of the equation; A large-diameter diaphragm isn’t enough. The smaller the box gets, the more power you have to dump into the driver to get the really deep material to play “loud.” Past a certain point, things get ridiculous in one way or another, which includes the unbridled hilarity of cooking the voice coil or destroying the suspension.

A compact subwoofer is highly unlikely to do a whole lot for you below about 50 Hz. Forty Hz might be doable at “half power” if the manufacturer is using a bandpass design for the box. (A bandpass design is great in a small frequency range, and terrible everywhere else – which is perfectly fine for a subwoofer.)

You have to decide on what you actually need, versus what you think you need.

For rock-band reinforcement, really deep bass actually isn’t a top requirement. Mostly, what we need is high output, though not so high that we run the whole audience out of the room. I haven’t really cared about anything below 50 Hz for a long time, especially because large SPL at low frequency is what annoys the “neighbors” the most easily. “Varsity-Level” EDM, on the other hand, can be HIGHLY dependent on very, very low frequency information (35 Hz or even lower) that has to be at levels exceeding 110 dB SPL C, slow-average. Doing that in a reasonable way demands bigger boxes, or several truckloads of smaller boxes.

So, when you’re out shopping for low-frequency loudspeakers, be wary of anything that claims to be effective for concert sound below 50 Hz, while also fitting easily into the trunk of a compact car. If a single box is going to play low AND loud without a staggering amount of amplifier power, it just can’t be little.


Why I’m Excited About The New X32-Edit

Alternative interfaces are best when they actually leverage the power of being alternative.

Please Remember:

The opinions expressed are mine only. These opinions do not necessarily reflect anybody else’s opinions. I do not own, operate, manage, or represent any band, venue, or company that I talk about, unless explicitly noted.

x32edit-screenWant to use this image for something else? Great! Click it for the link to a high-res or resolution-independent version.

Even if you don’t use X32-Edit, the remote/ offline software for Behringer’s X32 series of consoles, I think you should keep reading. I say this because the point of this article is not to “dig deep” into the feature set of X32-Edit. Rather, I want to speak in (fairly) general terms about what console-remote software can get right, and not so right.

So, anyway…

I’m a publicly avowed fan of Behringer’s X18. I’m especially a fan of the control software, which I feel absolutely nailed what console control software should be. The ironic thing was that I felt the X18 application was markedly BETTER than the remote control/ offline editor for the X32 – and the X32 is the higher-tier product!

But why would that be?

Well, rather like the gentlemen of “Car Talk,” I have a theory – or, more correctly, a hypothesis. My guess is that the X18 software was better because it was free, from the very beginning, to act purely as a virtualized interface. The X32 series is solidly founded on consoles which have a real control surface, the only true exception being the X32 Core model. An X18 and its cousins, on the other hand, are built on the idea of having almost no physical controls at all.

With the X32, then, it was very easy for the software designers to choose to closely emulate the look and feel of the physical control surface. In the case of the X18, there was never any surface to copy – and the control implementation benefited greatly as a result. The software was always meant to be a connection to something abstract; DSP and digital console commands have no physical form that they are required to take. With this being the case, the presentation of the controls could be built to fully embrace the nature of a display device fundamentally decoupled from the console. The control layout can be rearranged to best leverage whatever screen size and geometry is available. Actions can be streamlined, contextualized, and made more powerful with the recognition that a user can apply multiple control gestures (click, long-click, double click, right-click, etc) on a single element. You can easily have a console overview that provides a ton of information, yet remains interactive.

The X18 software took great advantage of the above, which meant that I immediately recognized it as the way that X32-Edit SHOULD have worked. To be both clear and fair, the previous iterations of X32-Edit weren’t poor or unusable. What they were was “conflicted.” They sort of took advantage of what a large, decoupled view device could do for console usage, but they also often limited their behavior based on the limitations of the physical control surface’s display. Why make something less capable than it can be? In my mind, yes, there is a point in having familiarity – but getting powerful usage out of a console is more about understanding the concept of what you want to do than memorizing the button presses to do it.

Also, the old X32 remote implementation never showed as much overview as it could have with all the screen real-estate that was available, and it couldn’t really “flow” itself into different screen shapes and resolutions either. It had a basically fixed size and aspect-ratio, and if that didn’t take advantage of what was there…tough.

Thus, I am very, very happy with the new X32-Edit. It acts like a beefed-up version of the X18 application, taking all kinds of advantage of being a virtual window into the mixer. Everything seems to be more immediately accessible, and the display offers real customization in terms of what you’re looking at. The software isn’t trying to be a copy of the control surface; It’s trying to be a replacement for it.

And that has made X32-Edit into the software that it always should have been.