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Live Sound Education Goes Off-Campus

Live sound courses have been added to the curricula at many major pro audio education facilities in the last several years. The one at the Curb College at Belmont University, in Nashville, seems to be taking it a step further, though. Clear As A Bell (CAAB) Audio is the name of the SR provider based at the school that's staffed and operated by a dozen students enrolled in Curb College's Audio Engineering Technology Advanced Sound Reinforcement course.

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Mean Failure

In the Oct. 2008 issue of FOH, I relayed a story about an experience I had at the Umatilla County Fair in Hermiston Ore. The long and short of that story was that while attempting a sound check, the area was hit with a nasty hailstorm and winds upwards of 70 miles per hour. The net result was that the tarp blew off the front-of-house position – including a Yamaha PM4000 – and the bucket of the 4K became a bucket full of water.

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A Realistic Approach to Subwoofer Time Alignment

This screenshot from SMAART shows a reference of decibel levels (dB) and frequency (Hz) for four saved memories: a sub (orange), a top (blue), a sub + top (pink, before delay) and a sub + top (green, after delay). Digital processing has made it easier to add delay to multiple signals.

Time alignment is a very important yet often overlooked aspect of system setup and tuning. A correctly time-aligned system has many benefits, including more even coverage where two sound sources overlap and a more even response across acoustical crossover points. It can give the cheapest of systems a couple decibels more in the area where engineers tend to like them most: bass frequencies. So let's take a look at subwoofer time alignment.

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It’s a New Year

I sat down to write this month's installment when I realized that we have not only entered a New Year but we are now in the second decade of the new millennium. Whatever happened to that first decade, I ask myself.

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Radial Komit Compressor / Limiter

The Radial Komit is a 500 series compressor-limiter that simplifies the process of dynamic manipulation while expanding upon creative tone shaping. The design provides flexibility by introducing automatic functions that are both musical and intuitive.

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Finding the Soul of the Mix

The Soul Button

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, defines the word Soul as: "The principle of life, feeling, thought, and action in humans, regarded as a distinct entity separate from the body, and commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; the spiritual part of humans as distinct from the physical part."

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Sweet Little Lies

Once I was supplying our Meyer system for a speaking engagement where the guest speaker was the Prime Minister of our country, Brian Mulroney. It was the Cattlemen's Barbecue held at Poplar Hill, Ontario. Mr. Mulroney was one of those gifted public speakers who is able to talk and hold the audience in the palm of his hand. He talked and everyone just stopped and listened.

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iPhone Apps

Studio Six Digital SPL meter

I was out on a gig a couple of months ago and one of my favorite people in this business, Buford Jones, was on the same gig. Somehow as we were talking it came out that we both have the SoundMeter app from Faber Acoustical on our iPhones. We began comparing notes, agreed that we both liked it. He asked if mine was calibrated, and I said "sorta," explaining that I went to a show and just jacked around with the settings until it was reacting consistently within a couple of dB of the "real" meter sitting a few feet away on the console. I asked how he has calibrated his, and he told me he used MAPP and the anechoic chamber at Meyer Sound. So I'm guessing his is a bit more accurate.

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