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Road Tests

Road Tests

X5 HANDHELD CONDENSER VOCAL MIC
By Bill Evans

Any of you who have been reading FOH for a while have probably heard me openly refer to myself as a condenser slut when it comes to mics for vocals. I own a bunch of mics and am probably unusual in that I actually own more vocal condensers than dynamics. A condenser just has that “air” and open feel that it is tough to get from a dynamic, and I generally find that the audio quality of the vocals goes up substantially just by replacing dynamics with condensers.

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Niagra Fallsview Casino Resort Opens New Theatre

NIAGRA FALLS, ONTARIO — One of Canada’s leading luxury casino resorts, Fallsview Casino Resort offers a variety of top-tier entertainment every night in its 1,500-seat Avalon Theatre. Recent performers have included Gretchen Wilson, Donna Summer and Lionel Ritchie. To help provide the best sound quality for the theatre’s patrons, and to better accommodate the tour riders of visiting artists and sound engineers, PA Plus Productions of Toronto installed two Midas Heritage 4000 mixing consoles and Klark Teknik EQ and processing systems at the theatre.

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Wolf Trap’s Filene Center Enhances Its Audio for the 2007 Summer Season

VIENNA, VA — The Wolf Trap Foundation's Filene Center enhanced its digital audio control capabilities for the 2007 summer season with the installation of three Dolby Lake Processors to manage main front of house left and right, and the lawn and center cluster speakers. In addition, four Dolby Lake Processors have been installed to optimize all 16 monitor feeds, including the mixer's cue. 

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Dan Hernandez Joins FOH as National Sales Manager

LAS VEGAS — FRONT of HOUSE magazine is pleased to announce that Dan Hernandez has joined its staff as National Sales Manager. Hernandez brings more than 20 years of pro audio advertising sales experience to his new position at FOH, including stints at Live Sound Int’l, Church Sound, EQ, Mix, Pro Sound News and Systems Contractor News. Hernandez will be in charge of advertising sales for FRONT of HOUSE magazine across all its outlets as well as audio sales for sister publication Stage Directions. 

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Allstar Audio Systems Puts Down Roots

And gets on the road to success. . .

A country singer, a tour bus and a new town were the ingredients of success for Mike Borne, who arrived in Nashville in 1979 after being hired to handle the FOH responsibilities for country singer T.G. Sheppard. Five years and 13 number one hits later, Borne decided that it was time to start his own company and get off the road. Thus, Allstar Audio Systems Inc. was born. 

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The Proof Is in the Pudding

Precise Corporate Staging and Alice Cooper team up for a good cause.

Thanks to an ever-widening web of generosity, dozens of underprivileged and underserved segments of the population are being helped in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. 

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Getting Good Tone for Golden Voices

They may have whisper-clean sound, but Celtic Woman’s not a secret anymore.

It might be understandable if you have not yet heard of Celtic Woman, but the “secret” that has enthralled millions of PBS viewers and myriad concertgoers will not be one for much longer. The group’s debut was the #1 album on Billboard’s World Music chart for 68 weeks, only to be bumped off by their Christmas album, then that release was knocked from the top slot by the group’s A Woman’s Journey earlier this year. Having notched three successful albums (including a recent Top 10 rock/pop entry) through massive public television exposure, the Irish folk/pop project offering both covers and originals has beguiled audiences with a quartet of pretty voices, a vigorous violinist, pulse-racing percussion and a smooth mixture of energetic and ethereal moments. Currently wrapping up a 100-plus show tour, Celtic Woman is becoming one of the biggest (yet quietest) pop sensations around. 

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Load In, Load Out Load of …

My two combined nightmares both deal with my band — supplying a P.A. to my own band and not having them help. As any anklebiter will tell you, it may not be a lot of gear, but it’s sure not a little, either! I need help to set up, and my band sure didn’t want to help out. As soon as I got to the gig the whining started. “That’s too much P.A. gear, Dave. You won’t need it all.” 

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Flying in Good Sound

Jeffrey Holdip and crew keep Canadian songstress Nelly Furtado sounding great no matter where she is.

I recently caught up with FOH mixer Jeffrey Holdip and the rest of the Towers Clair Showco audio crew for Nelly Furtado. Adamson’s Ben Cabot helped out for the first two shows of the Canadian leg of Nelly’s world tour by tuning the house system. He uses sine-wave sweeps with a multichannel version WinMLS by Lars Morset to equalize the Clair IO processors. He chose WinMLS because it’s the only portable multichannel measurement system quick enough to handle the time pressures of touring. Ben’s kit of six microphones, multichannel sound card and computer can easily fit into a laptop bag and be hand-carried onto an airplane. This was the first time I have seen WinMLS used on a major tour. I have used almost every measurement system on the market; I think that tuning the house before the artist sound check with WinMLS and using Smaart when the band plays is ideal for getting the most useful measurements. Most speaker manufacturers use sine-wave sweeps because they’re accurate even when there are extraneous noises. With a sine-wave sweep you can get usable measurements even if there is hammering and banging going on. 

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Applauding the Ovation

An intimate room gets the star treatment.

Jeff Thompson has what they call in the business a conversation stopper. He’s used it a couple of times now while working with tour managers who are advancing a show at the Ovation Lounge in the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Las Vegas, where he serves as the entertainment production manager. “They’ll ask me what kind of boxes we have, and I tell them L-ACOUSTICS KUDOS,” he said. “Then they ask about monitors, and I tell them that we have L-ACOUSTICS 115XT HiQs. Then we get to desks, and when I say Midas XL8s, everybody pauses and asks ‘What do you mean, XL8s?’ And I say, ‘At front of house and monitors I have XL8s.’”

Always throws them for a loop. 

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Follow the Money

 

First Bosch buys Midas, and now Harmon International has agreed to be acquired by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Goldman Sachs for $8 billion dollars. Hey, I’m small time and $1 million dollars seems like a lot of money to me. Therefore, an $8 billion dollar purchase sounds like the type of numbers my friends and I would spew out when we were little kids trying to outdo each other on the playground. “When I grow up,” I’d say, “I’m going to have a gazillion million billion dollars.” 

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Wireless White Space

And where do we go from here?

There is a bunch of stuff in this issue about the current obstacles facing the live event audio community regarding wireless communications, and if you are not really well-versed in what is going on and what is likely coming up, it may seem like we are talking out of an orifice that is usually reserved for expelling material other than speech.

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