An Exploration of THD
Here’s a video I made explaining the basics of THD and looking at an interesting measurement from Ethan Winer.
Here’s a video I made explaining the basics of THD and looking at an interesting measurement from Ethan Winer.
This chart shows NIOSH exposure dose data for nine live music events I worked on in the last few months, sorted by performance duration (longer performances on the right). The data is stated in percent dose, with 100% representing the full recommended exposure limit for the day. Green bars indicate shows that I mixed (I had …
Such is the reality of things that we often have very little time to wrestle a sound system into a performance-ready condition. Here is a tuning I did today of a 1200-seat theater that took twenty minutes start to finish, and most of that time was running around with a microphone. A lot of the …
This week I am involved in an event featuring onstage puppetry with some unique technical challenges. The production was originally staged in a small black box theater with carefully controlled sightlines. Adapting the touring version of the production to the 700-seat theater required an out of the box approach – or more literally, an in …
Our heroes find themselves in a larger reverberant space (an armory, actually) which is, of course, the best environment for events requiring speech intelligibility. PA is twelve dual-15 boxes per side with a sub “mono block” on the ground front and center. The optimization you see here was masterminded by my friend David, whom I …
One of the earliest studio mixing tricks that I learned was parallel processing – running the same signal through several mixer channels and processing them independently. There are a few variants of this technique, the most common being parallel compression. For example, the first application I saw of this was when a studio engineer double-patched …
My mixing technique is largely subtractive in nature (remove things from the mix that don’t need to be there). If I’m getting a lot of hi hat bleed through the other drum mics, I’ll pull the hat fader back. I’ll high pass, low pass, and mid-scoop mix elements that aren’t contributing necessary energy (or contributing …
This past weekend, I mixed an outdoor concert with RCF as the PA sponsor. My colleague has been planning on investing in a new compact-format array system for a while, and this event proved the perfect occasion to do a test drive. A trim height of 17.5 feet on an SL100 and a coverage area …
RCF is a production partner on an outdoor rock show I’m running this weekend. They sent along 12 of their HDL6-A line array cabinets along with four SUB 8004-AS subwoofers. It’s a killer little rig that packs a punch, with some smart engineering – stay tuned to next month’s issue of Live Sound International for …
Modern line array elements have very narrow vertical dispersion at high frequencies, which allows us to manipulate inter-element splay angles to manage overlap and therefore power addition. However, at LF, dispersion is very wide (approaching omnidirectional) and the elements overlap regardless of splay angle. Thus, all boxes in an array contribute to LF headroom over …