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Alto Professional Stealth Wireless Speaker System

Alto Professional Stealth Wireless Speaker System

I’m one of those types who likes to avoid wireless if at all possible and I usually shake my head wondering why when a client or artist insists on using an RF mic when they never wander more than about five feet in any direction. So last year when Alto Professional announced its Stealth Wireless speaker system, I initially wasn’t too impressed. In most portable sound systems, adding another component (and level of complexity) just to replace 25 feet of cable feeds from a stagebox or snake to the mains just didn’t seem worth the extra effort.

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DiGiCo's SD5 console

Deciding on a New Console System

In last month’s column, I expressed the opinion that the greatest challenge in making a digital console platform change is coming to terms with the data legacy of one’s digital history. Saved within the Avid VENUE platform, I have compiled and stored seven years of complete console data from several tours with James Taylor, Mariah Carey, Joe Walsh, Cher, Bette Midler and Five For Fighting. Among these archives are extensive input/output patches, complete channel libraries, EQ libraries, and individual libraries for an extensive number of Waves, TC Electronic, Trillium Labs and Avid/Digidesign plug-ins. I have repeatedly employed this store of information contained in these libraries to quickly and easily construct shows for varying band formats or random one-offs with entirely different bands. Having this dense repository of information literally at my fingertips is a luxury to which I have grown rather accustomed.

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Once scandalous, now common: Push “play” and the DAW serves up multitrack pre-recorded stems – to enhance the “live” show.

Is It Live, or is it Memorex? (And Do We Need to Care?)

We never needed the word “analog” until digital came along. In the technologically antediluvian universe of pre-zeroes-and-ones, analog, like God, simply was, with no reason to have to somehow quantify it. Similarly, when Thomas Edison came along with his new-fangled recording machine, we then had to adapt our understanding of the word “live.” Before you could record it, music, of course, was always performed live. Edison’s invention led us to the irony of the “live” album, which had its heyday in the 1970s, as well as endless variations meant to fool not our frontal lobes but rather our limbic cores with phrases like “recorded before a live studio audience!” Is it live or is it Memorex? After a while, we seemed to stop really giving a damn.

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Your needs may not be as elaborate as the famed, once-a-decade Oberammergau Passion Play 2010 — with its 2,000-character cast, but you might still need a larger sound system for your special seasonal services and programs than for your regular weekly services. Photo by Brigitte Maria Mayer.

To Rent, or Not to Rent

A few years ago, I installed a really nice sound system in a church located in the South Bay area of Southern California. The church had been damaged by a fire 12 months earlier and they were having Wednesday and Sunday services in a large tent that had been set up in the church parking lot. A local audio company supplied the sound and lighting for the services. You may be wondering where I am going with this story, but read on. Anyway, the audio company was charging the church $2,000 a week to rent and operate the sound and lighting system.

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Illustration by Andy Au

Being There

It’s been a long winter, but spring is just about here and hopefully it signifies an end to the bad weather and the beginning of a beautiful summer touring season. All the road dogs who recently submitted resumes to me looking for off-season work are now mostly unavailable when I call. The bus has left the dock, and audio is on the move! Once again, the musical caravan is carving a path through the clubs, sheds, theaters and summer festivals on this continent and across the globe. Regional audio companies will be getting calls to fill venues with sound for concerts and corporate events, and local television stations will require assistance with band appearances as they promote the show du jour when the tour comes to town. For a month or so, high schools and colleges will be having their graduation ceremonies and — in association with their formals and proms — there should be a good amount of work for local audio companies and audio technicians.

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VUE Audiotechnik was among the exhibitors with new product at ProLight+Sound 2014

Show Report: Product Hits of Prolight+Sound 2014

FRANKFURT, Germany — If there’s any slowdown in the industry, it wasn’t evident at the recent 2014 Prolight+Sound expo, which drew 897 exhibitors from 42 countries. This year’s PL+S featured plenty of new sound reinforcement consoles; live speaker systems and subwoofers were also big news at the show, along with an assortment of production essentials for live sound applications. We’ll provide full details in the April issue of FRONT of HOUSE, but until then, here are our picks for the top hits of the show.

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At the FCC in DC, from left: Joe Ciaudelli, Sennheiser; Jackie Green, Audio-Technica; Mark Brunner, Shure; Karl Winkler, Lectrosonics

Industry Begins Wireless Talks with FCC

On Feb. 6, Shure counsel Bingham McCutchen led a group of microphone manufacturers, top frequency coordinators and broadcast network representatives to Washington, DC to meet with some FCC Commissioners and the Incentive Auction Task Force — essentially those working on FCC guidelines regarding the proposed sale of the 600 MHz band, currently slated for mid-2015.

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A Global Revolution in the Making

The Winter Olympics just finished up and — other than getting hooked on endlessly watching all the competitions, one theme that struck me was the concept of a “shrinking” world. Between the Internet, Skype, emails, FedEx deliveries and web forums, the entire globe is a much closer knit community that ever.

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