Rupert Neve is one of the greatest circuit designers in the history of pro audio, and his name is synonymous with excellence for recording engineers everywhere. So when Rupert gets involved with a live sound product, we should take notice.
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How far would you go to work a show with one of your favorite artists? When I was first contacted about traveling to Moscow to participate in a performance with Cher, my internalized answer was, “Really?” but my externalized answer was, “Oh yeah!”
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If the recent presidential election taught us nothing else, it’s that data has replaced content as the king of media technology. No matter how good a show could potentially be, if you suddenly discover that the FOH console you were expecting to use for it is lying in pieces on the wrong end of a loading dock 2,000 miles away, it’s not the missing faders you’ll really be stressing about but rather the missing information, like channel labels, phase, delay, filters, EQ, inserts, compression ratios, gate thresholds, aux sends and masters settings that those faders would have been accessing.
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Dealing with acoustic guitar in a live environment can be tricky business. A lot of external factors — many over which you have no control — influence your options for getting the guitar into the PA system, producing sufficient volume, delivering tone faithful to the instrument, and avoiding feedback. Your ability to effectively mic an acoustic guitar on stage is dependent on the stage volume of the musician(s); the volume of the audience; the acoustic guitar player’s preferred method of monitoring; the type of guitar (steel or nylon string) and your budget.
Read More »As individuals, most of us have made a list of resolutions for the New Year. At the same time, many houses of worship have also resolved to upgrade, replace or re-invent their sound systems. There is no doubt that January is a great month for these plans. Actually, any month would be fine, but I get more calls in the first month of the year from churches that want to make changes to their sound systems than any other month. So, January is usually a great month for me.
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There are very few days that we work less than a ten-hour day, and that’s on a good day. From load-in to load-out, we’re lucky if the clock stops ticking at the ten-hour mark, and even if it does, we still have to take into account all the time spent just traveling from one place to the other. Time is money and as I see it, we manage to spend more time than the money we make. I’m not complaining. I’m just stating a fact, because by the time this piece is published, we may all be lying at the bottom of the fiscal cliff clutching our empty wallets due to expired tax cuts.
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It’s hard to believe that December’s already here and 2013 is right around the corner. That, of course, is unless some ancient Mayan astrologers were right in their assessment that the planet would end on 12/21/12, in which case, all bets are off. If for some reason, that happens to be the case, try to get paid up front for any holiday gigs you book.
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For the last four months, this column has focused on the physical behavior of horns and the drivers that are attached to them. We intentionally tried to present these subjects with enough technical meat to be interesting even to very experienced pro sound practitioners. This month, we step back and re-examine frequency response, something that’s common in pro audio, and displayed on most equipment datasheets.
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No matter your musical predilection, there’s no denying that Barbra Streisand is one of the biggest talents in show biz. She is the epitome of élan and elegance, bringing a level of detail and sophistication to every aspect of her professional presence, from motion pictures to Broadway to concerts. As for the latter, the notoriously stage-shy artist’s performances have been few and far between; the beginning of her 2012 Back To Brooklyn tour marked only her 82nd performance in a six-decade career.
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Roland Systems Group has long been established in the pro live sound industry, going back to the initial debut of its Roland Digital Snake at the New York AES convention in 2005. Once production units became available some months later, I was blown away on hearing an A/B comparison between analog signals running over 300 feet of copper cabling (which sounded dull, with nearly no HF sparkle) and the pristine sound of the Roland system, with 40 channels of 24-bit/96kHz audio running over a single Cat-5e cable. If that wasn’t enough, that S-4000 Digital Snake also offered the additional ease of “splits” using Ethernet switching hubs, simple redundancy setups, expandability to 160 channels, remote-controllable preamps, low latency performance and PC/Mac software for configs and monitoring.
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For more than 30 years, Third Ear Sound has served the San Francisco Bay Area and grown with the technology supporting the needs of its clients. The staff of eight has an average of more than 20 years of industry experience. “Everyone is our audience” is the company slogan, and they mean it.
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I’m not really sure if this is a review of a product or a phenomenon. Since it was unveiled at the 2012 Winter NAMM Show, the industry has been talking about Mackie’s DL1608, an iPad-enabled digital live mixer, to a level that hasn’t been experienced since the Alesis ADAT hit the streets some two decades ago. Part of this stems from the mixer’s impressive price/performance ratio and part comes from simply offering a cool — and convenient — way of working in the live environment.
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