How do you get from a childhood in the walled-in "island" of West Berlin, surrounded by communist East Germany, to a life on the road in the monitors hot seat and a home base just a few miles from the Las Vegas Strip? Andy Ebert, monitors engineer for Stone Temple Pilots, made the journey. But he suggests that the transition for him was far easier than it might have been for a fellow Berliner on the other side of the wall.
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It is widely known that different Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) sound different. I have heard this difference ascribed to everything from sample rate to the quality of the limiters, whatever that means. Certainly there is a difference to be found, but I suspect it is not going to be discovered using audiophile words like "warmth" and "depth." Largely to satisfy my own curiosity, I asked users of Sound Forums Network pro audio community (www.soundforums.net) to input a set of identical settings into whatever DSP they had access to and send me the results.
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In case you hadn't heard, there was a big, fancy wedding at centuries-old Westminster Abbey on April 29. But the Royal Nuptials were actually just the latest in a succession of high-profile events that have taken place in the Abbey, formally known as the Collegiate Church of St. Peter in Westminster, within the last year or so.
Read More »To download a PDF of the FOH May 2011 Buyers Guide, CLICK HERE.
Doing it "your way" is almost always an admirable trait, and it's one that enables a lot of people in the pro audio industry to get a foothold in the business and to get ahead. But there are other times when a compelling case for the division of labor makes sense – such as portable power distribution.
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This is the first of a two-part review. Next month: A closer look at some of the things you can do with the software bundle that comes with this product. Far from a throw-in, the software is really an integral part of what this product is all about. -ed.
One of the quirks about this business is that the older and supposedly more knowledgeable you get, the faster the transition is from cool, new "toy" to necessary "tool!"
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The first thing that caught my eye when I looked at the Peavey Impulse 12D is that the enclosure sports a ribbon driver rather than the typical high compression driver. The ribbon driver is an exclusive Peavey design based on the ribbons used in the Peavey Versarray line arrays. Even if you don't know what a ribbon driver is, you can't help but notice that the horn section of this injection-molded enclosure is very different from what would be considered the norm.
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It's not quite accurate to say that John Heinz, founder and owner of Atlantic City's Concert Quality Sound, was born into the business, but he sure got an early start. His father worked on the tech end at the Hughes Television Network, which was in part a forerunner to ESPN, and also one of the first companies to get into closed-circuit telecasts – it was working those sorts of gigs at Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall that led to the Heinz family relocating there from New York, and it's where young John got his first exposure to the world of sound.
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Five years ago, I migrated from working on analog mixing consoles to the digital platform. Leaving a familiar environment caused more than a little trepidation, but I decided to jump in with both feet. No hybrid world for me, I decided to go digital all the way. Dealing with latency and multiple conversions were not attractive prospects, so I also left behind the thoughtfully assembled racks of beloved outboard gear on which I had depended for so many years.
Read More »Owsley "Bear" Stanley, who died on March 15 in Australia in a car accident, will be remembered by most as a hub of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, the enabler of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' acid tests chronicled by Tom Wolfe. Readers of FOH will also recall him as a seminal figure in live sound, who designed, financed and operated the Grateful Dead's massive sound system and mixed live sound for Hot Tuna, Starship and other bands, both before and after he was arrested and imprisoned for possession and intent to sell 350,000 doses of his trademark psychedelic, LSD, in 1967.
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The Digitally Steerable Array ("DSA") is a type of loudspeaker that is in its relative infancy compared with other sound reinforcement technology. This unique audio animal is primarily intended for small-to-medium size commercial and house-of-worship applications where priorities include intelligibility, controlled dispersion and aesthetics. DSAs present an external appearance much like traditional column-type loudspeakers, but there is way more going on internally than meets the eye. Let's take a look at the concepts behind the DSA and the technology that makes it possible.
Read More »{mosimage}There is no doubt that spring is in the air (at least it is here in Southern California). I know that some of you are still getting rain, snow and cold weather, but those long warm, days are just ahead of us. And what does that mean for many of us in the worship sound biz? It means that the "Outreach" season is upon us.
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All too often, we get a call for the infamous "Microphone for 500 people" and then patiently explain to the prospective client what that entails in the real world of audio. As tedious as these calls can be, taking the time to discern exactly what the client is attempting to achieve and building a system around their needs and desires is what we do.
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