Here’s a quick “checkup” tuning on a basic flown L/R point source rig in a small black box theater. I was on the site working on the comms system and we decided to quickly measure the PA before I left. This entire process took ten minutes from top to bottom. The idea here is to …
This week I am working with a modern black-box theater to configure and optimize their installed system. I haven’t gotten to any of the “fun” stuff yet because we’re still untangling the mess left by the original installers. Allow me to elaborate on that statement: Usually when a subwoofer is not working, someone’s blown up …
Handled monitors for a small split-stage festival this weekend. The idea is that the stage is an A/B configuration: as a band is playing on one side, the other side is being turned over. We had 32 inputs on stage (16 per side) on an analog split with FOH. We set the entire console up …
The practice of double-patching channels is more common than ever due to modern consoles with high channel counts, but it’s not a recent innovation: a long-standing technique when mixing monitors from front of house has been to use a “Y” cable to split key inputs like lead vocal, which allows the operator to have independent …
Today I was helping a buddy of mine bench-test some active monitor wedges. My audio interface decided to kick the bucket, but that’s another issue. These are 12″ coaxial boxes that have a very small form factor. I really like them. He had six of them and it was clear that at least some had …
Pat Brown has written a fantastic article on bench-testing a line array before installation. This verification step is important, as it often reveals issues that we want to know about while the boxes are still on the ground. But in the case of issues with an already installed system, it can be equally effective. Case …
Theater retrofit. Actually a retrofit of a retrofit of a retrofit. Concert hall designed for acoustic transmission, hideous six-horned center cluster added in the 80s, replaced a decade ago with a modern L/R “line array” system and a center sub, and today’s job is to install a pair of flown fills to handle the coverage …