Looking Back, and Ahead
Hi Everyone,
I'd like to introduce myself, though most of you already know me. Like many I started out playing in a band. We occasionally lost a musician and had to break a new one in. During one of these "personnel transitions," a previous guitarist called to rent my equipment and hire me to haul it and run it. In the 1970s, PA wasn't much bigger or more complicated than my drum kit. And I didn't have a gig that weekend.
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Prince Welcome 2 America Tour Gets Support from Rat Sound
Rat Sound is providing sound reinforcement for the current leg of Prince's Welcome 2 America tour. The system consists of six hangs of 10 L-Acoustics K1 in the round with 42 dV-DOSC and 40 SB28 subs powered by L-Acoustics LA8 amplifiers, and engineers Majid Malki and Fred Lucas are using an analog Midas Heritage 3000 console.
Read More »Show Report: Prolight+Sound 2011
To download a PDF covering Prolight+Sound 2011, CLICK HERE .
This year's Frankfurt Prolight+Sound (PL+S) exhibition was significantly more buoyant than 2010's event. As with last September's PLASA show in London, there was definitely more of a buzz and manufacturers seemed to have positive expectations for the coming months, which is reassuring for our industry.
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From the Wall to the Monitors Hot Seat
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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All DSPs Are Not Created Equal
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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Westminster Abbey’s Updated Audio System
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.
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PreSonus StudioLive 24.4.2
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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Peavey Impulse 12D
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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Concert Quality Sound Bets on Atlantic City
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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Waves Plugins, Part 1: Snare Drum
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’s Long, Strange Trip
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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