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Be Helpful From Anywhere in the World (pandemic or not)

By Nathan Lively

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In this episode of Sound Design Live my guest is freelance sound engineer and audio entrepreneur, Ed Kingstone. We discuss streaming events, remote mixing, and staying in business during a pandemic.

I ask:

  • Where do you see the demand right now? What are the most common services people are hiring you for?
  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to remote mixing?
  • Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.

Zoom is the next set of tools to learn.

Ed Kingstone

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Lily J.
  2. The New Normal? Working remotely. Live Proof of Concept.
  3. Mics: Sennheiser 421 and 441
  4. Spiritfest SF20, All About Love Gatherings
  5. Books: Microphones: How they work & how to use them
  6. Quotes
    1. Wayne’s World is the backdrop of my youth.
    2. Just take all the work that God sends and it’ll be fine.

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. Please let me know if you discover any errors.

I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by freelance sound engineer and audio entrepreneur Ed Kingston. Ed, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Hey, thanks, Nathan. How are you doing?

Doing good. How do you feel about that intro? I was reading all the stuff about you, and I was like, you know what the simplest thing is like? Freelance sound engineer, audio entrepreneur, how do you self identify?

Well, I have been doing this for over 20 years now, and I’ve done so many different. I’ve got a grey beard, and my hair is going great, and I last cut it in 997. And when people ask me how long I’ve been doing this, I usually pull my hair down on my backside and. Av, about this long? Yeah. It’s a passion that I’ve had since I was a kid. I have fond memories of my dad coming home from work with one of those old little plasticky tape recorders that you put a cassette in.

And my uncle had a modular sound system in his front room with a really nice old turntable and a good selection of vinyl. And my grandfather was an electrical engineer. Av, between those three things, I ended up developing a taste for music and mucking about with electrical stuff and wiring, and it’s turned into what I. Av, awesome.

Well, let’s get into that. So I definitely want to talk to you about we’re going to talk about streaming events today and sort of remote mixing and painting speakers. But before we do that, just to get to know you and your musical tastes a little bit here. Ed, after you get a sound system set up or maybe a speaker put together, what’s one of your first go to favorite pieces of music to put on to just get familiar with it.

I’ve got a selection of about five or six tracks, and each one shows me something that the system is doing, and what I try to do is turn it on and play something and then look for things that aren’t supposed to be there and get rid of them. So I’ve got two tracks that I use. Let me just find them here by Salmon. Av, and they’ve got this really kind of bright Bow Town five K thing that really shows up. If there’s anything wrong in the high mid in the vocal region, I put on a gorilla track called Sunshine in a Bag.

I believe it’s called it’s just on. My playlist is Gorillas. And that’s got something in around the 3400 that tells me the bottom end of the vocals. Right or not, I’ve got a Rega track called track number eight off of block 16. And the CD that I ripped it from has a scratch on it, so I have to forward through the first 30 seconds, AV, it pass the scratch, and then this fog Horn, this fog corn baseline, comes in that does the two notes, and then it does a third note that some systems just don’t do.

And that tells me what the bottom end is doing in the system, and I can get that all sitting nicely. I quite like The Prodigy, the Queen’s not favorite tune, Smack My Bitch Op, because when it drops, it drops. And it’s got all that distortion stuff that I like from my previous heavy metal days when I was a kid and an Alanis Morissette being Canadian. And it’s the secret track at the end of Jagged Little Pill. And if you go to the very end and then just let it play for a couple of minutes, there’s an acapella thing about her singing to an ex lover in the shower, and it’s just acapella with this tremendous Reverb, and that will let me know whether or not the room’s behaving well for me.

And there’s some stuff about 800 in there that I can fix.

To.

Do a queuing, and I don’t play the whole track. I just play snippets of each track. And now I’ve got this down to five minutes of just clicking through and going did five minutes of clicking through and going, Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick. And I can make the room or the PA or whatever it is sound reasonable. And then I got a few other go to things, but.

Oh, that’s great. Do you think there’s anyone listening right now who might be young enough that they don’t know what a secret track is?

That’s quite possible.

You grew up when there is from CDs.

I remember having a fake Sony Walkman made by Sanyo and listening to The Queen’s Greatest Hits, just about the time that Michael Myers would have been learning how to drive. And he grew up a few miles away from me. I never met the Man, but Wayne’s World is the backdrop of much DB youth in Scarborough, Ontario, suburban Toronto in the nineties the same adventures. The name of the bar comes from Toronto. No, go ahead.

This is a perfect example of live streaming issues, right? Because I’m calling in on my phone because I’m in my new office and we don’t have Internet yet. The latency, I guess, is pretty significant. And so we end up talking over each other. And this is just one of the problems that come up when you’re trying to connect with people around the globe and you don’t have any control over everyone’s Internet connection. So we’re going to talk about that a little bit more, but go ahead and finish up what you’re saying.

And then I’ll explain what a secret track is.

Well, yeah, I grew up in and around the Toronto area in Canada in the 1980s. Av a teenager and I got over to England in the early nineties and wants to work in a pub. And these guys came in and started talking about this guy with long hair, head banging with a red check shirt, headbanging in a little blue hatch, back to a Queen song. And I thought, how does he know what I did when I was 15? This is Michael Myers taking the piss out of my teenage years in Toronto.

And the bar in the movie is called The Gasworks. And I used to play there before I was all enough to drink. I’d do the er real it’s upstairs. It was yeah, it’s now a surplus shop. I went back last summer and saw a year ago last summer and saw it’s now a surplus shop. But it was actually a bar called the Gas Works where all the heavy metal bands played. And it is literally tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. All of the stuff I did when I was 15.

That’s hilarious. What about Stan Makita’s Donuts?

Stan Macros? No, that’s Tim Hortons.

Oh, okay.

You’ve heard of Timmy’s?

Yes.

I was really shocked. I was in the Middle East on a gig and I walked into the shopping center and found Tim Horton’s. Donuts. And I was like, Yay.

Okay. And I was going to explain for anyone who met young enough to not AV ever experienced CDs for a while, I think in the Net, it was popular to put AV secret track at the end of the CD so you could have a total of 72 minutes on a CD. I can’t remember. But if you didn’t have enough material to fill the CD, then it was popular to just put a bunch of silence at the end of the last track and then have another. Like, what you would normally play is like a B side or something at the end of the track.

So my high school band, we did that. We had some, you know, weird Inspector Gadget cover at the end, and lots of people did that. So when you rip that CD and put it onto your ipod later, you AV this one track that was super long because it just had all the silence on it. So that’s what the secure track is. Nostalgia DB, how did you get your first job in audio? Like, what was your first pan gig?

My first pan gig was club in the infamous Hawkstone Square called the Blue Note. And I kind of I’d finished high school and we lived outside of the city and I moved back to the Toronto area and went to Trees, which was a recording art school. And then I dropped out of Trees after about six months because having a job, a girlfriend, a band. Av school where I wanted to learn how to mix and they were trying to give me communication lessons. I fuck fuck this, screw this or whatever.

So this works. And then and then I went and did some repair work and learn how to fix stuff at George Brown College for a couple of years. And then almost immediately moved to England because my English girlfriend ran away from Winter. And my buddy from College lived on a boat over here with his girlfriend. And I moved in with my girlfriend. And we kind of, you know, we hung out for a bit. And then I split up with my girlfriend and I stayed a couple of years later, I was pushing boxes for the local crew company.

And this guy came up to me while I was painting some staging one day. And he said, do you want to work for do you want to paint some speakers? And I said, sure. And I went into this warehouse for a company called Brittania Ro and learned how to spray paint speakers. And the network a huge right.

That’s one of the biggest production companies in the UK.

Yeah. And the next day I got a phone call from somebody saying, do you want to come and mix a band? And I said, sure. And I walked in and they had the same brand of speakers, the same turbo sound stuff. Av slightly older model. And it was a guy named Eddie Pillar who owned Acid Jazz Records that ran the club. And he liked what I did with the band and said, do you want to come back tomorrow? And that was it. I was in DB DA.

I knew that you knew how to mix a band. I mean, how did you get that job Besides just in the right place at the right time?

A friend of mine that was hanging out with Eddie said, oh, I know somebody. He’s just got a job at a PA company. And I went in and I plugged stuff in and I figured it out and made it sound okay. And they asked me to come back and I was there until the place closed a couple of years later. Okay.

And I know a lot of things have happened since then. Your life and your career. Av had all these twists and turns. But I was wondering if we could Zoom in on one particular moment when you feel like things really took a turn for you. And I find that with a lot of people, there’s a moment when they make a decision like, okay, I’m not going to do this thing anymore. Okay. I’m going to move to London or I’m going to do something different with my life.

So I’m wondering if looking back on your career so far, maybe you could tell us about one of the best decisions you made to get more of the work that you really love.

Well, I’d been working for this company for several years, and I’m not going to mention their name because they no longer exist. And they basically had a bad reputation for client service and paying their employees and I was stuck in a trap with them where I’d go into jobs only to be told that the money’s coming next week and then the money’s coming next week. Av spent years living in squats in London because I couldn’t pay the rent regularly and had did free parties on the weekends when I didn’t AV gigs on and it was all very hedonistic in the nineties and great fun.

And then a decade went by. So the Pink Floyd song says, ten years has gone by and nobody told me when to run. So I just spent about a month and a half getting ready to do this festival with these guys and they were doing dance music and I was getting kind of tired of staying up all night and doing babysitting DJs and things. I was very good at it. But I wanted to mix bands and I got a phone call from somebody that I AV worked with before and they said, do you want to come and work for use of Islam?

Av, the Live Earth concert in Germany on the same weekend as this festival and I was at loggerheads with the owner of the company. I walked into the warehouse to look at the prep sheet and pull all the equipment for the festival. And there wasn’t a single piece of equipment on the prep sheet in the warehouse. And that’s when the phone rang and I had to fight with the guy that was in the office at Take as the owner of the company was somewhere else and went to the calf to have a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich.

And on my way to the calf there was Thunder and lightning inhale and I walked into the calf and this guy’s song is playing on the radio in the calf. And I thought, I can’t ignore any of this. So I called up the company and I said, you know what? I’m going to be going to Germany. And I went to Germany and I think it was the front of house guy that squeaked, but it squeaked on the second track and he wasn’t touring or anything. He just did a one off and I never saw him gain.

But that walking away from those that enterprise was the best thing I ever did. So sometimes saying no, sometimes saying no is best. You know, I had this idea that you just take all the work that God sends and it’ll all be fine. And I was just getting pigeon holed into this place. I didn’t want to be anymore. That’s probably the biggest one that’s happened more than one one, but never on that scale.

Alright. So AV, this year’s Lifetime summit, you AV, a great presentation and a demo of remote mixing. You AV a couple of different people at different locations and you showed how you can remote in to control their mixes, listen to them, do recording, do editing, do overdubs. And if people want to watch that, they can do that. Av, Live Town Summit 2020 DB Sound An AV Com But what I would love to ask you about related to this is kind of just where the business side is a little bit, because the thing that you said during that presentation that really caught my ear was that we AV sound engineers should be thinking about how to help people customers, clients solve problems that they’re dealing with now, starting trying to do live streaming events, trying to figure out how to do their events with social distancing and put them online.

And one of the things that you mentioned, for example, was helping people figure out how to charge for a live event that they’re streaming to Facebook, for example. And so I’ve sort of been keeping my eye out for that, and, like, looking for products that are turning up. And I’ve been seeing solutions for that specific question. And so I don’t know if we want to specifically talk about that, but my real question for you is from just looking at a business and demand perspective, like, where do you see the demand for this right now when you’re getting calls?

Av, you’re seeing other people getting work for this kind of stuff. What are the most common services that people are hiring you for related to remote mixing?

Well, the demo that I did, I basically figured out how to do that from a history of using Yamaha equipment, the Yamaha mixers and wifing to them. And I’ve been doing it for over a decade now. When the first M seven came out and I saw somebody plug a WiFi box into the back of the M seven and then link to it, I’m like, oh, wow. I can tune the monitors without having to run back and forth and play with faders and stuff. So I did that.

I figured that all out, and then I just expanded on that. But the monetization of it, I’m still kind of struggling with I haven’t actually done any mixing in the way that I demonstrated, because most of the people that I’ve been working with don’t actually have one of these mixers at the other end of the Internet, you know? Yeah. So what I’ve been doing is to go online beforehand and have, like, a pre Zoom meeting and go through all the Zoom settings and go through the mixer or equipment or whatever it is they’ve got there and try to optimize that so that it’s stable and doesn’t fall over.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed was Zoom is once you’ve unticked the automatic stuff that, you know, gets rid of persistent and background noise and things like that and turned on your original sound and gone through all of that, that you can’t actually turn the volume up very much on the Zoom call because of the feed to the Zoom from their end, because the logarithm that they’re using is designed for audio that’s speech based. And when you start putting full spectrum music through it, it gets glitchy and starts guttering and falls over and stuff.

So what I’ve tried to do is get people to mostly just turn down their Zoom feed or turn down what they’re feeling to Zoom. And that fixes a lot of stuff. You know, yesterday I did another sound check for somebody that AV did a gig for a couple of weeks ago where they raised £2000 for a charity that plants trees in the Amazon. Were trying to reforest the Amazon because it’s all being burnt down at the moment. And they called me up because they’re doing another gig tomorrow and they said, oh, I’ve got all this new stuff.

And they had a nice Neyman large diaphragm condenser and they bought a new Universal Audio Apollo Twin, and they got their MacBook and stuff. And I spent hour and a half 2 hours with IEM yesterday just going through the set up. And at times I’m having a WhatsApp call with them AV video call saying, can you show me this thing and show me where the connection is and just going through everything in detail with them and making that work? And they’re sending me some hair care products from one of those sponsors.

So the previous gig I did for them, I got 75 quid for a couple of hours of my time, sat here with headphones and a microphone, and just I did that. I did all the pre work, I guess, pre production work the day before and set up the Zoom meeting with them. I found that using Zoom, if you pay the 40 quit or 30 quit or whatever it is for the Zoom webinar, you get HD sound, AV HD video, and you can.

Okay.

And that’s a much better option than just the 15 pound upgrade. And you can do custom streaming with that as well, rather than just to Facebook or to YouTube. But yeah, set it all up, make a DB. What else I’ve done is I’ve made a dead space on one of my Facebook friends Facebook page, and basically it’s not published. So if I need to check something, I can stream to that, and I’m an editor on it, and I can stream to that and then go back and check what it’s like.

And that’s been very helpful as well. Okay.

This is actually really helpful. Sorry to interrupt you. I’m just realizing that what you’ve actually been doing a lot is a lot of consulting, and it sounds like where the demand is is number one, helping people set up their equipment, but also kind of understanding just how to get the most out of Zoom. And one of those things is just like paying for Zoom webinars so that you have HD audio, but then also having, like, an unpublished Facebook page so that you can stream to that and no one sees it, and then you can look at it later.

That’s a great tip.

Yeah. And I set up a PayPal. We did one streaming event for these guys called All About Love. And there’s a page called All About Love Gatherings on Facebook, and you can see a couple of the events I’ve done there with them. One of them is with a guy named Kyle Murray and Susie Row. And they actually sang together on Zoom. And they threw away the whole concept of timing. Just did kind of AV acapella bit where one of them did a drone, and the other one busked a melody over top of it.

And that sounded really, really nice. And that worked. And then they went back and forth with their stuff instead of using the spotlight on the Zoom meetings. Av done. We let them mute and unmute their cameras. And when you’re streaming to Facebook, that lets them join in, and you can have two or three people up at once, and then everybody leaves, and it just leaves the audio. Remember that spotlight, but they’re doing it all themselves. And make sure that you tick the box in the Zoom settings under Meeting Settings Advanced.

And you can no, sorry. The recording settings, and you can tell it to record the Gallery view rather than the spotlight view. And then you get that AV a recording that you can then do other things with later. Yeah.

The only way that I figured out how to make this work for me is because I find the settings and Zoom not to be particularly intuitive. What I’ll have to do is I’ll check one box, then I’ll start a session, hit record, and then stop it and watch it and see what that setting does. And then check the next setting and hit record. And AV like it takes a while, but you have to go through all of them to kind of learn what they are, what you want, this particular.

Yeah.

And then Zoom does an update, and it all changes. Go back to the beginning.

I want copying a lot of calls about this stuff. Right.

Well, yeah. Av didn one weekend long streaming event where we basically did a festival onto and these guys set up their own TV station, online TV station called Spirit Fast TV. It’s got they basically put a field up for the festival called Spirit Fest 20, and you could go into different tents and see different things happening at the same time. So it was more like a real festival rather than just sitting and watching somebody perform on Facebook. And we get a slightly better quality video out of that.

And we set all of this up. And we went into a yoga studio in Brighton, which is a beach town about an hour south of London that was donated by one of the artists who lives in the yoga studio and the tent up in the back garden and put a control area out there with a bunch of Macs. And I had my streaming setup that I’ve cobbled together out of some bits that I’ve managed by for about a grand and a half and some old stuff I had lying about.

I borrowed some old Cal RECs off of my flatmate and bought a wide angle camera for 18 quid from China that took ages to arrive and set all of this stuff up in the yoga studio and used that as our base. And we had a band come in and I set it up so that it’s like, unplugged. So there’s not everything’s miked up. I had the two Cal races room mics, and everybody’s gain to sit there being very quiet in the space when we’re doing the streaming.

And then I put two vocal mics up and I ran them through a sound craft EFX that’s got a Lexicon Reverb unit in it. It sounds quite nice. And I put the left and right output into my edit role. And then I put 258 up and ran them through a couple of Bol ones that were just either side that one of the other artists brought in and made this setup so that we could have some Reverb and some effects and stuff on it if we wanted to.

And it’s, you know, mostly acoustic things. But one guy turned up with a keyboard and another guy’s got instrument, a traditional instrument called the Cora from Africa that’s basically the gourd from a calabash with stick attached to it, and it’s got about a dozen strings on it, and it’s a really beautiful sounding instrument, but his plugs in, so we plugged that in and he’s got a little effects pedal that he runs some effects through and stuff and brought that into the room and then sent the room mix through the Cal Rex out.

And it sounded really good. Unfortunately, when we tested this all and I was doing two streams at once, so I’ve got a Zoom meeting streaming, some yoga classes running in the back. And then I’ve got in the space the artist practicing. And I had two streams running all afternoon on Friday when we were testing and things. It was great. We had this fat broadband installed specifically for this gig. And then Saturday came and it was 30 degrees and everybody went to the beach from London, and there was thousands and thousands of people on the beach on their phones, and it swamped the local broadband and what can actually speed.

Av died from like 11:00 on Saturday. We started at 10:00 and 11:00. Everything just ground down to a hat where I could basically just stream the live room. I couldn’t bring any Zoom in and stream that back out because I was using OBS to do the live stream, and I could manage to get one of the streams stable after about 06:00 in the afternoon when people started going away. Unfortunately, we had enough prerecorded stuff that people had given us that we’d already uploaded to the server, that we could slot that in.

And like, I we had a guy in Bristol, which is the other side of the country who was running all of the background stuff and doing all of the Facebook, you know, advertising and bring people in and stuff like that, trying to get people’s attention. And he was uploading these videos, placing them at the right time on the right channel and things like that for us. And there was another chap in the back or there were two chaps in the back in the tent doing similar stuff, and we managed to pull it off.

Wow.

Okay. So for people who don’t know or haven’t used it yet, OBS is open broadcaster software, and it is the really cool, free, open source, cross platform streaming switching recording solution. And a lot of us AV been getting for video to it now that a lot of things are going online. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s a really handy video stuff.

Another thing that you said that I thought was really cool is that you had backups. So that’s one of the questions we are going to get into a little bit later. But one of the things that people have been asking about is, you know, what to do about latency and what to do about connection issues. And we’ve all seen this online, even, like, these big sort of what seems like high value, expensive, high production value events, like they can’t do anything to ensure the connection quality of people at their homes.

So, for example, I watched a live reading of the original cast of Princess Bride a couple of nights ago, and my friends and I were texting back and forth, and one of them, AV said, hey, this looks as bad as basically any Webex meeting I’ve had to go to for work. And I was like, yeah, that’s true. They’re having the same audio and video issues that we all have all the time. So it’s really kind of leveled the playing field. It doesn’t matter how good your technology, AV, how good your team is.

Like, you still can’t fix people’s connections on their end. You can’t control everything. And so it sounds like one of the backup solutions that we should have and that you had is to have some pre recorded content. So in case everything goes wrong, you can throw that up. Was that the situation?

Well, the pre recorded content came about kind of accidentally because we gain into the event a week beforehand. We you know, I started trying to contact all of the artists and do my preproduction stuff and trying to do sound checks and things or video checks or whatever you want to call them, and found that there was a lot of people that were AV, not in the same place that they were going to be in B didn’t have access to the equipment that they were going to use on the day when I was available to do the sound check or C, we’re just like, oh, I’ve used Zoom on these things before, and it was really crap.

Can I just send you a recording? So we started accepting prerecorded bits, and as they came in, they were getting uploaded onto the server for the TV channel. The AV been uploaded. And when it all fell to pieces were like, what are we going to do? Wait a minute. We’ve got a piece of stuff from these guys. And having the guy in another town that wasn’t being swamped by all of these people coming to the beach was a godsend, you know, because he’s on the other side of the country.

And this is another thing is, you know, I’ve done stuff where I’ve done the pre sound check the day before, and I’m doing with a guy in Australia, and he’s in a different time zone and a different thing. And all of this and the throttling that happens because it’s kind of like airplane seats, you know, they oversell the airplane because they know some people aren’t gain to turn up. And then when it’s too full, they just basically say, oh, sorry, you can’t get on. And they oversaw the broadband subscriptions because they know that not everybody’s gain use it all the time.

And then at 06:00 on Friday afternoon, when everybody gets home from work and school and goes to switch on Netflix and check their email and do whatever it is that they do at 06:00, it slows down everywhere, and it’s like traffic. It never happens the same twice in two weeks. You know, it depends on what’s going on. So I’ve done a sound check one day, and then the next day, I’ve gone to log on with the guy and his broadband connections. Absolutely rubbish. The day before, it was solid.

The best one I’ve had was a guy up a mountain in Columbia who’s paid 300 quid for a mast to be put up. And he’s got six up and six down, which seems really small, but it was so stable and so clean he could actually get some good volume out of it without a glitching.

Okay.

And then just before his last song, one of his dogs kicked the plug out of the wall and his brother shut off. And I just like I just said, I think that we’ve lost him, you know, and he’s popped back in Gain and done one more song. It was great. So it doesn’t matter how much pre production stuff you do. The last one I did, the other chap in the room had left his microphone open, and I just handed over to the artists to do their preamble AV introductions.

And I’m trying to get one more guy logged into the meeting, and I’m shouting instructions to somebody over the phone to the other guy and it’s coming up his onto the meeting. They’re like, Ed, we can hear you. And I’m like me. No, because we’ve got three people in the same space, all on a Zoom meeting, all on headphones. And we’re all trying to have a chat beforehand and go through how it’s all gain to flow. And then we’re trying to bring in the host from somewhere else.

And he wasn’t AV his PC and was trying to get Zoomed to work on somebody else’s machine. And, you know, he’s not attack, and it caused a little bit of delay, so it’s really kind of bite the bullet and just go with it. I think from my point of view.

Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of the conversations that I’ve had over the years with other podcasters who we’re always trying to figure out. How do we get you AV the interview? E to have a solid recording. And so, you know, from the emails I’ve been sending you, I have this list of all these things that I try to get you to do. Please use headphones. Please be in a quiet room, et cetera, et cetera. I have this whole list, and then someone will follow all those rules, and then they still figure out some way for the recording to sound terrible.

There’ll be some loud clock in the background or something will always go wrong. So it’s just part of the surprises that come up when you’re trying to connect with people like we’re doing now. And so we’ve already sort of been talking about this for a while, but I wonder if you could maybe go over some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to either remote mixing or live streaming events. So like having your dog near the plug, that’s a mistake. What are some of the other common mistakes that you see sort of messing up live events?

Well, when I was setting up to do this recording, I pulled out up four to one that I had laying about that I borrowed off of a friend for something I did a couple of weeks ago, and I popped it up and I sounded absolutely glorious. And then my computer started updating in the background and the fan kicked in and I could hear the fan noise cause the four two ones so wide. So I swapped to I think this is a four four one, which means that if I move my head just a little bit off access, I get quiet, but it doesn’t pick up the fan noise.

So picking your equipment is quite important. Trying to making sure that the WiFi is plugged into your PC is a number one place of flower connection, a wired connection. Go through the settings and turn off the stuff in Zoom. So I’ve talked to so many people through this. You got to turn off the automatic adjust microphone volume to start with.

Okay, that’s under audio.

Under settings, that’s in the audio settings. And for some reason, on Max that pins it all the way to Full all the time, which is really boring. But then you have to do some stuff with the sound card and fix it that way. But on my PC, I can turn that up and down. Then you go into Advanced, and they’ve now removed the two options that I used to always get people to turn off, which was the suppression for background noise. Leave the Echo cancellation on, and then there’s a button show in meeting option for an able original sound.

And if you’re using a sound card, make sure that’s ticked, cause then you get what’s coming out of the microphone without any crap. And then the trick is to not overdrive Zoom. And I know that it’s got a little blue line or on the Max, it’s got a green and red line that shoots back and forth like an Led display.

Yeah. Has a little neater there. Yeah.

Yeah, but it because the algorithms designed for speech, when you start putting full spectrum audio through it, it craps out. When you get much past half and starts glitching, and lots of people will try to do that thing of getting it as loud as they can. And that’s the big, big, big thing is turn it down and you’ll get a better audio quality out of it. It won’t be that lovely, rich, full thing that everybody wants, but at least it’ll be clean and stable from the beginning to the end.

Just ortion free.

Yeah, well, it’s not distortion as such. It cutters. So there’ll be a dynamic bit in the music, and suddenly you’ll get, like a half a second where it’s gone away to think, and then it comes back and the music’s there again, you know, and you can get rid of that by just turning the volume down. So it’s not like flipping or anything. It’s just literally a break in the tune, like the Max headroom kind of thing. You know, for anybody that’s old enough to know who he is.

Do you know about this enabled stereo setting? Can I ask you a question about that?

I found it in the PC one, but apparently it’s unavailable on the Mac version. I don’t mind a Mac, so it’s on yours. Okay.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it’s buried somewhere in the settings, and I’ve picked it on all three of my versions because I’ve got three machines, and sometimes I’m doing testing, and I have to have all three of them running at once, and I’ve just gone through and I’ve made all the settings the same on all of them because I got three accounts. I only have one upgraded at the moment, but I use the other two for testing and things like that.

Okay, so the problem that I ran into this year’s Lifetime summit is that Ken Putman Jutan wanted to share some live mixing with us, and that worked well enough. We figured out a trick. I don’t know if it’s really a trick, but the problem that we had Lifetime Semi, 220 and 19 is that we were trying to mix voice and music into the same gain to the same pipe and then put that into the microphone input. Av, Zoom and Zoom does not like that. If you put anything that’s not voice into the microphone input, then it thinks that there’s background noise and it’ll just turn the whole thing down.

But if you share your screen and then choose include computer audio, then you have a second input and then you can put music into that.

Now I’ll probably even come across that yet. I know about the sharing the computer audio trick to get gain videos and things like that. I didn’t have that ticked on one of my presentations, and that caught me out. Sure.

So one thing we figured out this year, AV Lifetime Summit is that if you share screen and choose Enable computer audio, then you have the second input that shows up, and then you can put music through that, and it works great. Enable stereo also works most of the time. And so we were able to share a stereo mix. It was streaming. It does not get recorded, though. So we’re recording to the cloud.

And have you tried to record the machine because you have two options. When you go into the record settings, you have two options. One is recorded to the cloud and the other one is recorded. Call to your machine. So if you’re recording to your machine, does it behave the same way?

No, I couldn’t get it to record either way in stereo.

Okay.

Unfortunately, Zoom is so busy now that their support is terrible. You can’t call them, and if you email them, they’ll just send you this automated response that says, hey, we’re really busy. And so they never got back to me about that question. So if anyone knows the answer to how you record in stereo, I’d love to figure that out.

I think probably doing what we’re doing here with Audacities the one.

Yeah. That mean that’s what I ended up doing in this situation is I ran a separate app in the background. I think I use audio hijack Pro, and I just recorded everything that was going on so I could have my own stereo recording. And then I just edited that in later. But it was very extreme stereo.

But not recorded in the recording settings. There’s also an option to record AV MP three of the audio, right. As a separate track. Av, you listened back and see what’s on that.

Yeah, I did try that. And that was all still in mono. It.

Yeah. I’m not using Zoom so much as a recording platform. I’m using it as a way of streaming to Facebook or, you know, if I want to do something more complicated or I’m doing something in the room, because the problem with OBS that I found is it’s really good and it’s really high quality if it’s all in your space. But to try to get AV remote camera feed into it and then stream that there’s OBS Ninja, but that that’s really, really dependent on somebody else’s server, and whether it’s busy or not, as to the quality that you’re getting there’s, stream Yard, I think, is one of them.

Okay, I’m looking at DB Ninja. So it says Add Group Chat camera, so you can bring in all of these other sources that I guess normally aren’t included in OBS.

What DB Ninja does is like with Stream Yard and Stage ten, that’s it. So with Stream Yard and Stage ten, which are browser based streaming options, you can log in from multiple sources and then combine them so you can have three people in three different locations streaming to you, and then you can mix them together like you do with OBS, with your different inputs. But with OBS, you don’t have that option as such. And this guy is a Canadian guy’s name I can’t remember at the moment has put this OBS Ninja together.

And if you go on your phone and type OBS Ninja into the search and click Add Camera, you get a little key that you then it’s a URL with a key in it, and you can then put that into the OBS in the browser setting. I think it is in your sources, and that then streams into DB from that camera. But it’s not greatly stable. It’s not stable enough to do much more than those kind of quick interview things that you see on the news when they’re holding their camera up and going, yes.

And there’s a fire in the Houses of Parliament today, an AV. Somebody threw petrol over the Prime Minister. Oh, no. Sorry. I didn’t say that online, did I?

Okay, cool. So, yeah, I’m looking through these things that you just mentioned, and they’re all kind of just different solutions for basically input and switching. So getting different inputs from different people from all over the world and helping you sort of AV a one man show, because I guess that’s what a lot of people are doing now. Like, how do I change?

How do I do my a lot of this is from Gain.

Okay.

So I think it’s a gain develop. It’s been developed around Gain, so you can have I don’t know what it is, but lots of gamers like to watch other gamers gain and learn tricks and things, and they stream their gain. And there’s a lot of this kind of stuff has come from gaming. So IEM kind of hacking gamer tech. Or I was trying to hack game or tech to make it work on for music and found that it’s not really working yet. It’s not fast enough yet.

The Internet is not stable enough. And my first machine, I had to go out and buy a new computer with like I had 500 quid that I could spend. And I bought myself a a Dell that’s got an Ie seven in it and 16 gig and 500 gain on the hard drive. And it works. And I’ve got another couple of weeks later I had another 100 quid and AV bought. I think it’s AOC that plugs in AV a second screen on a USB three and powers off of the USB three.

And I got AV Gigabit switch that’s got 16. It’s a managed Gigabit switch that’s got 16 inputs on it. I’ve sectioned that off into two different switches, one of them’s limited, one of them’s not, and an old Ederal. And this all fits in my laptop bag and I can take it with me, you know, and just go and set this up anywhere with a couple of microphones and do a Gig. So and I’ve been actually going to somebody else’s house to do the streaming for a couple of these things because he’s part of the community and he’s got Gigabit Internet and they haven’t got the fiber to my house yet here.

And I’m in London and the fiber is not coming yet. So when it does, I won’t have to walk 40 minutes to his house, but it’s nice to go and see him. And it’s a lovely walk down the river. And I get to say to the Swans on the way. And it’s great. Get my email.

This is going to be so boring for some people. I got to share with you that I’m so excited about our new house because although I am now calling to you Ted through my phone because we don’t have our Internet set up. When my wife was asking me like, okay, when we’re looking for houses, like, what are your criteria? What are you interested in? And I said, hey, all I care about is that we have actual fiber fiber because our old place is only a mile away.

But we were just talking about Lifetime Summit. And every year what would happen is we finished Lifetime Summit. And then I have these Gigabytes and Gigabytes and Gigabytes AV video that I have to upload to YouTube and other places. And it would just take days, days to upload from my place because all I had was fucking Comcast like a DSL or whatever. But I could walk like half a mile down the street to my friend Dave’s house who had fiber and upload it in like 30 seconds.

It was crazy. So I was like, okay, this is all I care about for our new place.

This is the thing that I was struggling with with the Spirit Fest event that I did where I had somebody who was literally up a mountain in Switzerland trying to they recorded an HD video because I got asked by the guy, give me HD, and it’s like four gig of video for an hour on performance. They’ve done it on their phone and they’re trying to upload it and it’s too big. And the other thing is there’s things like Mel, big file com, and we transfer and there’s a bunch of them that let you upload or send large files to different people.

And we tried Dropbox. Dropbox is too complicated for some people because you can send them a link, but they have to then go into the Dropbox and open up there, open up a Dropbox account and then agree to the link and accept this and do it. And it’s like five steps. And they just they’re musician people and they’re not technically minded and that’s they get frustrated and put it down and walk away from it. So it’s like, you know, the other big problem that I had with all of this is trying to find a quick, easy way to get high quality video from somebody gain faraway land on a really, really bad connection, like the phone to, you know, the guy who put this all together, he lives in a trailer park down by the seaside, and they’ve got a super big connection at the trailer park.

But really it then beams all over the trailer park by WiFi. And he’s got like this little tiny sliver of it. And he found that he was actually having to go to the local McDonalds and sit in his car outside the local McDonald’s and log into the free WiFi and McDonald’s, which is something I’ve done around the world because McDonald’s has free WiFi around the world and you can sit out or go in and buy a coffee and use the free WiFi models to do stuff because the hotel Internet where I was so poor that somebody bought a new Mac and bought nice Neyman and bought a sound card and bought the Pro Tools license.

And I went into the hotel to try to set this all up, and I couldn’t get it to download Pro Tools overnight on the hotel WiFi, even though we are the upgrade. So I went to the McDonald’s and used the free McDonald’s WiFi at 02:00 in the morning. It took 40 minutes. It’s just totally nuts. So, yeah, broadband is find it where you can and use it where you can.

So, Ed, we’ve been talking for a while. I just wanted to try and sum up some of the things I’ve been getting from you and to really make these live streaming events work. Sounds like some of the most important things are. Number one, make sure that your set up is solid. So you have a good computer, you AV fast Internet, you have a wired connection. Make sure that your site is solid. Number two, you are doing pre production meetings with everyone who’s gain to be online ahead of time, at least like the day before, running through all the steps, making sure that they’re connection to thousand number three.

Oh, go ahead.

And during that preproduction thing, I’m doing my sound check using their equipment, and I’m just talking them through it. So patients, I keep getting told how patient I am. And yesterday, one of the girls that we did the two £0 for the trees, the Tree Sisters, three sisters, org if you want to go and have a look at it or look at their site, and she called me up and she says, oh, I’ve got this new mic and I’ve got a new sound card, and I’ve got to Zoom on Friday.

Can you help me get this all set up? And basically, I spent 2 hours going through every connection and trying to figure out why her new Universal Audio wasn’t outputting sound. And she hadn’t turned on the software in the computer that lets the Universal Audio there’s a little mixer, and that makes it work. And then once we got that on, I did the remote desktop thing like I did during our presentation and went into it and found one of the freebies that took a little while to find which the freebies.

We had to get her to log in and go through the list and stuff and found the free compressor or AV free audio channel with it’s a valve audio channel with little bit of EQ and some Reverb. And set that up for her remotely in the software for the Universal Audio and saved it for so that when she turns up AV the next place because she’s in an Airbnb somewhere else, and she’s streaming from somebody else’s house, you know, for the next event. And when she turns up and plugs her computer and she can hit recall and gets that those settings back on.

And that is the core of it. One of the people had one of the little Zoom mixers that goes with the L one, and it’s got a compressor and EQ. And I’m talking people through, so if you press the EQ button, what do you see? And they’re saying, yeah, well, I’ve got gain. And then I’ve got QY. And then I’ve got frequency. And I’m like, okay, put the frequency at 250, put the queue at .3 and then take it down a little bit. Yeah. And suddenly the guitar becomes clear and they can’t hear any of this.

And then I’m like, yeah, just touch a little bit of Reverb onto that. And I’m actually doing I’m talking people through. I’m mixing by proxy using a musician AV, my proxy, who’s never actually touched one of these things before. And, you know, having the Zoom meeting going and then taking the phone and having a WhatsApp video call so that they can show me what actually equipment they’re working on. And I can then say, oh, yeah, you see the third dial down, turn that one a little bit to the right.

And then I’m like, no, no, no, too much. Just back a little bit. And then it’s like, yeah, that’s good. And I seem to be getting good results. And people keep asking me, it’s not paying very well, but, you know, that can only improve as this becomes more of the new normal or we’ll start doing more gigs. But I’ve got a feeling we got a second lockdown coming. I’ve just been on a trip through Holland and Belgium and France for I got a place over in the north of France and I had to see some people in Holland about some potential work.

And while I was out there, they changed the rules. Gain, And I had to do two weeks of quarantine when I got back and AV come at a quarantin on the day that they’ve changed the rule from you can have meetings of 30 people to an AV, our gatherings of 30 people, too. You can have gatherings of six people. Gain, and so a couple of small things where there’s like, a group of people. Gain, to get together and do a gig. And you can have 30 people in the room.

So you can have, like three or four bands in the same place at the same time and do something and then stream that that’s gone. That’s gone again. You know, it’s just finding things that work and making it work. The PayPal PayPal is great. Friends did the last the Three Sisters gig. I set up a PayPal what’s it called. It’s a PayPal money pool. And I just had somebody on the other computer in the room and I’m showing Adam numbers as the donations are coming in on my phone and saying, we just got another £10.

Just got another £50. We’re up to 400 quid. And then somebody dropped 500 quid all in one go. And he’s putting that up on the Facebook well, this is all well, the people are playing and I’m typing instructions on the Zoom chat to the people that are singing, saying, you know, can you move back from the microphone inches, please? Because they’ve gone off well, it wasn’t there bit and come back in and they’ve sat down there. It was great. They were given this great big, huge empty room and they’ve got one large diaphragm condenser and an acoustic guitar and a voice.

And it sounded brilliant. And then they got too close and it started doing that glitchy thing. So I’m like, Can you just move back, please? And you have to wait until they’re looking at the screen to hit the send because it kind of drifts up middle of the screen and they’ll miss it if they’re looking somewhere else. And you wait till the end of the track with it Typed in and hit go, and it appears and they’ll go, oh, and you can see their eyes go light and they move back six inches.

And suddenly it was nice. Gain, sure.

Yeah. So many little details to keep track of and figure out how to do the jobs that we’ve always done in person. But over the Internet. And the third point that I just to wrap up this discussion, gain having some backup recorded content in case everything goes wrong or you can’t get someone. And it sounds like one way to make sure you do that is just have that on your checklist for pre production. So you do the preproduction call, you make sure that the person’s connection as well, and then maybe record something with them and say, hey, record some of the things that you were going to say, and then you have that as your backup.

Yeah, that’s a good plan. Recording the soundtrack, get them to play a little bit of stuff. The other thing is the guy that we had on the other side of the country, he was going on to YouTube and taking stuff that AV been posted on their channels and just dropping it in because it’s already been published and it’s the right act, and we cheated a little bit, but we did have quite a bit of prerecorded stuff from different acts, and we change the scheduling around a little bit, but be fluid with it.

This isn’t like AV, where you can have every single minute of it written out on a script and it’s going to get followed. And you’ve got a big team of people that are going to make sure that happens. It’s all really kind of a new thing. It’s getting better. My friend John Brown that I had on that did the electronic music side of it. I was just talking to him and he’s just put a fiber network and AV Land network into something called the Guild Hall School of Music in London, which is quite famous.

And they just did a 90 piece Orchestra playing together from four different places in the school. Now, this isn’t using the Internet, and all of the audios being done on Dante and the latency is very, very slight, but they got 90 people in an Orchestra playing in four different spaces playing together, and it worked cool. The trick that he said was don’t worry about syncing the audio and the video, because the 40 milliseconds of latency they’ve got on the video by the time it goes out and comes back, that’ll screw up everything and people will hear that.

So leave the audio as it is and let there be some latency with the video. So when the conductor is doing his thing, that’s not too bad, because the musicians are listening to each other and they’re playing with each other. It’s not all about the video. So.

So I wanted to mention you mentioned two Thin Haze microphones, and I just had to look them up to make sure I remembered what they were. So the 421 is a cardioid polar pattern in the 441 is super cardioid.

Yes, this is the four and one I saw one on a high hat the other day on a video that was done about some Motown stuff. It’s super flat. It’s almost like Bardy AMIC 201 and its flatness goes very high. It’s got a small condenser in it are not a small condensed or a small dynamic in it, and it does quite good high end. And the four two ones got a slightly bigger diaphragm and it can make strings sound good. And they’re both kind of old school mics.

But a lot of the people I know have these and they’re floating around.

Let’s talk about pain. I would love to hear a story from you about the biggest AV, maybe most painful mistake that you’ve made on the job and what happened afterwards. Oh.

That’S there’s been a lot of pain in my world, the biggest and most painful thing I’ve ever done. I don’t know whether that’s gain to be physical pain of getting in the truck with a bunch of people that didn’t know how to lift and trying to hold that box up so that that young kid didn’t get crushed. Or it could have been the day that I smacked somebody in the pub after work for being I was too drunk. Okay.

Yeah, that sounds painful. Which one do you want to talk about?

Well, yeah. One of my biggest clients dropped me like a hot potato after that one. I don’t have a great recollection of the incident other than I was in Barcelona on a corporate gig. And we’d all gone to the bar across the road and we’re drinking stuff that AV think it was Astrella it AV started early in the afternoon because we AV finished early that day and went to the beach bar and then carried on in the evening. And basically drinking at work has been, you know, and there’s been other things that I’ve done at work over the years, but I try not to do those anymore, but drinking at work is something that’s used to be cool, used to be part of the pay package.

I remember my first job at the Blue Note. I got two free drinks. I would get two free drinks and drinks tickets for a pound after AV pound to go afterwards. And that’s just not how things are anymore. You know, the industry’s changed. There’s a lot of people now that have gone to College and University and come straight out into a world full of guys that have been lifting heavy shit at the back of trucks for 20 years and go and get pissed afterwards because it hurts and the two are really related.

Actually, I think because when I started doing hot yoga a couple of years ago and straighten my back out and discovered I’ve been walking around with chronic back pain, and I’d been drinking and smoking and doing all sorts to try to mask that and take care of yourself physically. It will help take care of yourself mentally. As well. You know, number of times I’ve gone through an airport and AV breakfast beers at 06:00 a.m. Just so that I can get another hour’s Kip on the plane before I get to the next gig.

And you get back afterwards. And you have two or three weeks of this post tour depression. And one of the things that’s quite easy to do is just go and go to the pub and see your mates at the pub. And there’s a couple of guys that do touring. One of them is a video guy. One of them is a lighting guy. And one of them is a drummer that live local to me. And I saw one of them playing in the local pub the other day.

It was quite nice to see everybody, and there were no microphones involved. It was a jazz for a kind of gig.

Thing that happened to Barcelona was this sort of a wake up call for you. And you’re like, okay, I can’t can’t keep going on the phone. Real.

Hit was another one of those kind of epiphany moments, like when the hail storm and the Thunder and lightning came. And then I walked in and there was that tune on. And I was, you know, on my way to the next gig and I got a phone call. And I didn’t actually recall the incident until somebody reminded me of it. And basically, AV bought somebody a drink. And they, you know, they’d been given it the large salad. And their dad was somebody high up in the firm.

And he was a bit of a noob. And he didn’t get on well with the client. And I was giving him a hard time in the bar about it afterwards because he needed an ego adjustment, I suppose. I thought he needed one swathed in beer and I was giving him a hard time. And one of the other guys that in his age group from the warehouse, AV. And I know him from time. And he was cool. He stepped in and poked me in the chest and said, oh, behave.

And I I smacked him outside the cheek, not tremendously hard, but it was enough that the guy who I’d been, you know, giving a hard time went back and told his dad. And his dad told the owner. And the owner told my line manager. And by the time I got through all of that, I was not flavor of the month anymore. Yeah.

There you go.

So yeah. But, you know, as one door closes, another one opens. And it opened up time for me to do other things.

Sure.

And, you know, I ended up going touring with these Pakistani guys around the world for six years. That’s a whole other side of stories.

Well, AV to schedule another interview just to talk about touring with Pakistan musicians. That’ll be great. And is there one book you could recommend that AV been really helpful to you?

Yes. As I mentioned earlier, I went to a recording art school for about six months when I was just out of high school. And it was one of the books that I got. And it’s called Microphones by Martin Clifford third edition. And I think the subtitle is how they work and how to use them. And it’s not just a book about microphones. It goes through it’s a paperback about an inch inch and a half thick. And it goes through all kinds of things about acoustics and reflection, reflective surfaces, and just a lot of the really basic things that I absorbed.

That when I started doing live stuff, I could actually understand and walk into a space and understand how is the space gain to react. And I ended up doing a few kind of studio mods where we’ve gone in and done soundproofing in Studios and things and how parallel walls work to create standing waves. And then discovering that standing waves are actually a little bit kind of simplistic because there are 2d thing, and we work in a 3d world. So there’s eigenmodes, which is three DB standing waves that’s more like bubbles of high and low pressure or pressure and rarefaction that occur at sub in the subbase region, depending on the size of the space.

You know. And then the other thing that I discovered is that I went into my friend’s studio and did some measurements because he was having some trouble with the low end in his monitoring room and discovered that it’s not the flat walls that you’re looking at. It’s the corners, because that’s where the distance in the corners is where you get your first problem, because you’ve got three faces joining together and three is joining together. And the standing wave develops between that opposite corners rather than the walls.

Just think, okay. And, you know, so you get a lump when you look at it, when you pink noise with smart, you get a lump where you get a doubling, and then you get a sock out. And when you do the math, it’s the distance of that corner to corner rather than the length of the room or the width. So this is all way before there was computer modeling that was accessible to us. When I was in the warehouse, it was still analog control gear. And I remember being at the Albert Hall.

And we hung something in the round for the Cliff Richard’s 40th anniversary gigs. And it was in there for like a month. So they wanted to do a proper job. And they had turbo sound, flood, and flash hung around the center stage, all pointing each one. Each row was pointing at a different balcony. And then up on the top, they had some JBL kind of near field stuff that was all. And it’s an Oval, so it’s not quite a circle. And it was all being fed off of one matrix through an SPX 90 and he just, you know, took a Sharpie and AV condenser and put the condenser on the desk and tapping the Sharpie on the desk.

And there was a guy with a radio up in the gods saying, One more, one more click down, one more click down, one more click on going around trying to find the sweet spot so that it sounded nice when you walked around the hole because it wasn’t into sections and there was no fiber with thousands of outputs on Dante that you could tweak each different channel on. It was basic stuff and see IEM put in. Then there’s no laser measuring device and time alignment. That’s how they did it.

And seeing them put in a bunch of flood and flash around the pitch at twicking and rugby ground. And we ran three 7 km of soccer PEX cabling in the drains for two days. And then these boxes on their sides pointed up the sides of the the tiered seating and then incorporating that in with the enhanced Hanoi system and, you know, and then watching them clip lapel mic on the backs of people shirts in the marching band, so that when the guys playing the trumpet, the guy in front of IEMs picking up the trumpet behind him as they’re marching around the pitch and just all these really old school ways of doing stuff to make things work.

And I got to see all of this. And that was gave me inspiration to be creative with EQing, with time alignment, with so many different things before we had the tools available. And then as the tools became available, it became easier and quicker to do these things, you know, and now the next set of tools is Zoom.

And it’s just the next thing to learn.

Yeah, next thing to learn. And I’m sure something’s going to come soon, and it’s going to be ten times better than Zoom. But for the moment, zooms, the next tool in OBS and these other, you know, everybody’s stage ten. I haven’t heard much great stuff about it falls over quite easily the stream yard. Lots of people have been using that because it’s a little bit better than you get a better quality out of it than the Zoom. If everybody’s got a good connection, but you’re going through their server and your control and stuff like that, and it’s just not quite you got to have the people at the other end a little bit techy savvy.

They’re not quite ready for that yet, I don’t think.

Well, Ed, where is the best place for people to follow your work at the moment?

I would say go and have a peruse of the Spirit Fest AV 20 festival. I think that’s still up. Okay. And then I’ve got a couple of things on all about Love Gatherings, which is a Facebook page. And then I did another one for Bright Sky, which is on Facebook. I’ve always been the guy in the background behind the camera, trying to stay out of short and not not using these tools to publicize myself and be the guy that everybody. I’ve got a group of people that call me.

And every once in a while, somebody I haven’t seen an age call me up or somebody refers me to somebody new. But I haven’t really taken advantage of, you know, advertising. And this is probably the first thing this and the demonstration we did during year seminar was the first thing I’ve done online. So I don’t have a lot of stuff that’s labeled as mine and up there.

Yeah, well, so people should definitely check that out, and they can take a look at your presentation from Lifetime Summit. So, Ed Kingston, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

Thank you so much for having me.

You Need A Sound System Preflight Checklist

By Nathan Lively

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In this episode of Sound Design Live my guest is by applications engineer for touring systems at L-Acoustics, Vic Wagner. We discuss sound system tuning, immersive audio, modular workflows, benchmarking performance and designing loudspeaker presets.

I ask:

  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to designing, deploying, and optimizing touring systems?
  • What do I need to verify to make sure I uncover any problems that will slow me down later?
  • Kyle Marriott: Can he explain how they reach the published specs for KARA II please? What stimulus, how long for, downhill with the wind behind it, the like?
  • Lee Stevens: Especially as they use the same components at KARA, how have they achieved the extra SPL?
  • Dave Gammon: Immersive sound is a huge new area of development. Do they see all large format production moving to L-ISA Format?
    • Explain the reasons why they don’t use SMAART as a defacto tool for system calibrations.
    • Why do you use sine sweeps for your measurement stimulus instead of a broadband signal like pink noise?
  • Tom McKeand: CA-COM… why?
  • Chris Prendergast: Detail how ‘their’ wave sculpture technology has developed over the decades
  • Ben Heavenrich: In his opinion, what separates L’Acoustics from the rest of the pack?
  • Stage Craft: How they design their presets?
  • b.meiners: How to achieve tonal balance with smaller line arrays?
  • Christian Friedrich: If smaller boxes are used for downfill at the bottom of the array, won’t that produce the same problem as gain shading?
  • Christopher Pou: Vic’s had quite the career, being an SE for such notable mixers as Scovill and Pooch. If it’s within reason to venture outside of the brown box realm, I’d be curious to hear his opinions on some other rigs he’s deployed; I’d say most curiously ANYA, as it stands out above others considering the flexibility it offers in terms of DSP-based steering and control.
  • Yves Smit: Can I combine kara and Kara-2 in an array?
  • Dan Barrett: How many toddlers does he think he could take in a fight?
  • Nico Díaz: Stereo vs Mono: If the stereo image is mainly enjoyed by few out of many, in a live event, could a single wide dispersion line array provide a more uniform coverage?

It comes down to identifying a workflow and a checklist specific to verification and calibration.

Vic Wagner

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by Mello C.
  2. Preflight checklist: In aviation, a preflight checklist is a list of tasks that should be performed by pilots and aircrew prior to takeoff. Its purpose is to improve flight safety by ensuring that no important tasks are forgotten. Failure to correctly conduct a preflight check using a checklist is a major contributing factor to aircraft accidents. –Wikipedia
  3. Touring Systems Optimization: Modular Workflow for Efficient Calibration
  4. workbag: TruPulse Rangefinder, P1, iSEMcon EMX7150
  5. Books: The Complete Guide to Highend Audio, Idea Factory, Failure Is Not an Option,
  6. Podcasts: Switched On Pop
  7. Quotes
    1. It comes down to identifying a workflow and a checklist specific to verification and calibration.
    2. We want to think about obstacles that can disrupt our workflow.
    3. Reach out to the manufacturer and immerse yourself in their recommended guidelines.

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. Please let me know if you discover any errors.

I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by applications engineer for Touring Systems at L-Acoustics, Vic Wagner. Vic, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Glad to be here.

So I definitely want to talk to you about sound system tuning, immersive audio and designing presets. But before I do that, after you get a sound system set up, what is one of your maybe favorite pieces of music to play to just get familiar with it?

I don’t think you’re going to like my answer here.

I’m not going to like it.

I’m a big fan these days of virtual playback. I’m a big fan of once you get the system calibrated to, you know, get some playback from a show previous or some kind of tracks and try to optimize or maximize the signal flow of your drive systems of console to any outboard gear and then kind of use that as the most accurate stimulus for for kind of verifying the system or do any kind of critical listening.

No, that’s perfect. That’s the thing that’s like freshest in your mind and you’re most familiar with because you have been working with it for the last who knows how many days. So as soon as it comes on, you’re going to immediately get a bunch of information.

Yeah. Now, my thing is, is that I think it’s good to do some ear training. It’s definitely good to dig into some hi fi stuff, dig into some kind of reference tracks and things like that, and think about scale. Think about listening to those those tracks on different sized systems. But that’s really just to kind of get an idea for frequency response and kind of how systems respond at different levels. But I think these days I just especially in the touring domain, is to really think about using content that’s relevant to the to the production.

And I think it’s pretty easy to do with modern mixing consoles. I mean, you can do it with a variety of different doors. And every every professional console allows you to play that back through the system. And I think that’s just a good kind of step towards verification to make sure all your outpoured gear and everything in the signal flow is working properly and acting responsibly as you like. So.

So how did you get your first paying gig in audio?

You know, this is kind of goes back to see maybe grade school days kind of volunteering at the community theater, honestly, just kind of working for some variety shows and mixing my buddy’s bands and and kind of doing some some high school musical stuff, drama club, those kind of things. But I think we’re really kind of took form, so to speak, being like, hey, well, this is something that I that I could do professionally is working with some some regional providers and kind of seeing some guys that build their own speakers kind of in the garage.

And that’s where I really understood this is a career path that, you know, is very scientific and exacting, but also musical and offers a fair amount of, I guess, esthetic leeway, so to speak.

And did you start working with those guys?

Yeah, I mean, it was it was doing shows in parks and kind of festivals and things like that and kind of kind of seeing, you know, we had to better get bigger systems and mixing with them and things like that.

How did you meet these guys who are doing who were building speakers in the garage? I’m just wondering, like, if I wanted to kind of recreate your path a little bit, like what are some things I should do to meet people who are doing shows and building speakers?

Well, it’s a little I think it’s a little more professional these days in in regards there’s a, you know, brands that focus on these kind of things. But this was, you know, me volunteering. And as the shows got more complex and, you know, touring, artists came in and expect larger systems or more complex systems. You know, we needed larger wedges. And this is obviously the day of days of wedges where I feel like a lot of the stuff is kind of in the erm domain these days.

But, you know, more complex kind of systems kind of comes up and in there. I think that that’s, that’s where we just kind of expanded and we had, we had to provide larger systems and those companies came in and I was, you know, volunteering or working kind of hourly wage at these places for for larger productions. And then and I guess I mean, you’re in Minneapolis, growing up in the Midwest, a lot of kind of summertime festivals going on.

So I was involved in that kind of circuit early on and able to kind of see what other people are doing and what touring people are doing.

Sure, I actually grew up in Texas, but the way my experience, the way I see my experience related to yours is that it was really helpful to work in a place where a lot of different artists were coming through. And I met a lot of people that way, which kind of helped me just see how work was done and also just start building relationships that later on could help me find work and do different projects.

Yeah, exactly. Now, speaking to that, I was just I was on a panel a couple of years back talking about kind of getting started and, you know, kind of these questions about how you can get an introduction to this industry. And I remember fondly reading kind of magazines, it was a bunch of trade magazines and stuff and all these kind of journals and. Realizing that at a pretty young age, that there’s a there’s a world out there like really professional potential, you know, there’s people that are doing this professional, there’s better products, there’s better you know, I always kind of think jokingly back to like, you know, these furry box wedges that are kind of the size of a small couch, know, and that’s very homemade.

But there’s better ways of doing things. And there’s a there’s a whole world of science and industry standardization that appealed to me. And I was kind of something that I want to become more a part of. But I think I wouldn’t have been aware of that potential without a lot of these kind of resources not getting these days. A lot of that stuff online and, you know, podcasts like this and that good in a way we all had and have gear envy you.

We want to get your hands on that stuff. And you kind of read these magazines and you can kind of feel bad like, oh, I’m not good enough because I don’t work on that stuff yet. But in your case, it also sounds like it was motivational and you’re like, oh, there’s this whole other world out there. And that’s kind of what you had your sights set on.

Yeah, totally. And that’s it was hugely. And I think that’s we need to make sure that those industries are thriving. And, you know, people students have access to those kind of things and those kinds of resources.

So, Vic, looking back in your career so far, can you take us to a place where things changed for you? Was there a moment when you decided, OK, I’m going to stop doing this thing and start doing this other thing? Can you tell us about maybe an important decision you made to get more of the work that you really love?

Yeah, you know, I kind of thought about this a lot of different angles. And, you know, I could talk about different gigs or different tours I jumped on and things like that. But I think we’re what really kind of ticked in the last decade or so of my career is that I found this kind of reward to really take the time to share my knowledge and experience with others and kind of teach some of these higher level skills and workflows and ultimately just inspire people.

And I kind of I think that was a really pivotal kind of decision. And I was thinking about it yesterday as I was looking through these questions. And I think that I could identify one place we were on tour, the big pop tour, and we had kind of a friend of a friend of a friend of the production had asked if we could have a some kind of production students and from the local college kind of come by and, you know, take a tour.

And it worked out really well where we were doing kind of we were kind of doing two ANORO shows. So we load in. And then we had that morning to kind of tech stuff and, you know, maybe have some time off and things like that and maybe get some rest because it’s kind of a strenuous schedule. But I took the time to get up early and kind of take these kids. Well, I guess a college kids, you know, young adults here through our I mean, everybody was kind of the lighting guys offered their their detail and their system.

And then I got to talk about front a house and kind of design and configuration and things like that and our our different system networks and things like that. And I just all all these guys are just really, really inspired by that. And we kept in touch over email and text and stuff over the next couple of years. And I think that that was a moment where, you know, I just took a couple hours out of my morning to talk about what I was, what I do and what our workflow is.

And, you know, these guys were just blown away by that. And I thought that’s a really rewarding feeling. And, you know, if that means that these guys are going to go and get a better result out of there, out of there, their productions or their deployments, I think that’s that can go a lot further than than anything else that I can do personally.

So so Vic, at this year’s LESSONED Summit, your presentation was called Touring Systems Optimization Modular Workflows for Efficient Calibration. And that, I think, is kind of a long title for basically saying being ready. And I’m so happy that you talked about this, at least on some. And if people want to watch your video, they can do that. A live Sound Design Live 20 20 does Sound Design Live dotcom. But the reason I was so looking forward to it is because you and I had a conversation earlier this year, in January, February, I think, where I asked you, like, what is the biggest challenge you see other people having out in the field?

And you said something to the effect of people are kind of not ready. They need to be prepared for any eventuality. They don’t have enough information. They’re not flexible enough. So things change, things go wrong, and they just like not ready, not handling as well as they could. So is that how you see it? And if so, how can I kind of think through some of these things and be prepared without just learning them all the hard way and going through all the thousands of mistakes that you and everyone else has already gone through.

So I think what this kind of comes down to is identifying a workflow, identifying checklist. And from the start, when we see that we kind of talked about in the system optimization presentation is looking at collecting information, talking about specifics, the calibration target verification and then calibration, but having kind of a. Checklist, a mentality of a checklist and a plan, and I say the plan of, you know, acquiring information and making sure certain parts of the system are determined and scaled adequately.

So there’s not any issues as we go through the verification process. And I think, you know, it acoustics. We spend a lot of time kind of thinking about this stuff internally and definitely teaching that in our in our trainings and then obviously kind of providing vertical solutions so people can can use this within our ecosystem. So I think, you know, it’s pretty easy for small deployments, but it becomes critical to stay sane and kind of keep on task and, you know, have a comfortable workday when you’re on tour.

So it’s even more important in those high pressure environments. And, you know, that was kind of one of the things I wanted to really bring to the to the live sound summit and really kind of exposed to the masses and kind of start a further conversation about this.

And, yeah, so that that makes a lot of sense to me. Work from a checklist, don’t make assumptions, have a plan. So the first thing that I wonder is can I just use your checklist? Like if I just had a copy of your checklist, would that work or would that not mean anything to me because yours is so personal? Or I guess I’m also realizing that a big part of your job is probably helping people build their own checklist before they go out on tour so that they have a plan.

Yeah, you said it. That’s that’s definitely, you know, helping people build their checklist and kind of work through those things. So I think a lot of that kind of comes down to preproduction planning that we talked about, this idea of kind of benchmarking system performance. So like thinking about what’s the audience coverage requirements, what’s the SPL distribution over the audience, what’s the target frequency response and how does that fit within different PHIL systems or coupled systems like flown sub, overground, sub, those kind of things, front fill out, fill delay speakers identifying those things across the board and then looking at where the the mics reference position is and then kind of consider source type and like what are the maximum SPL requirements?

Where do we need to stop coverage, start coverage? Is there any kind of mitigation if it’s an outdoor venue? So I think those are all really, really important things. And then yeah, then I think that that’s you want to determine the quality or the type of output bustline. Like I said, it was a very, very stereo mix as a dual mono. It’s an immersive mix. Is it left center, right kind of arrangement, things like that.

And you want to identify those things and ask a lot of tough questions and, you know, go through the process of designing different renditions or kind of being able to scale different parts of the of the system to adapt to those kind of things, to put the best solution forward for the bid or for the the writer. I kind of think about those things as far as and I think that’s one thing when you asked helping people is kind of thinking about how to scale through our product range.

So one of the things I kind of I just put a little quote on here is like when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is nail. And I’m sure you’ve heard that before. But, you know, not every show needs to be deployed with a bunch of K one and cast twenty eight things like that. You know, we want to think about what are these frequency response requirements, what are the Aspell requirements, what are the coverage requirements.

And maybe we can do something that’s a little less invasive and provides a higher quality experience for the audience and the obviously client.

See so when you say modular workflows, then there’s parts of it that are going to change depending on certain variables. So can you kind of give me an example of that? Is that related to benchmarking or I guess you just gave us an example, which is you might not need all of the front fills that you had in the last location.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So examples of the kind of modular stuff then. I think what we want to do is kind of build into the system some flexibility. And I think that’s one of the things is kind of have some quick ways to pivot. If something changes, if there’s a different audience configuration or different seating configuration or maybe like a VIP area that you didn’t anticipate or something like that, you know, have those kind of things.

But as far as verification before the calibration process, I definitely think we want to think about obstacles that can disrupt our workflow. So power everything up, make sure everything has adequate power, make sure network is connected, make sure you know your file is correct. The network manager file, for example, before you send that stuff, make sure you’re the left is going to the left amplifiers. The right is going to the right for those kind of systems.

Everything is bust and summed properly if you’re doing any of that kind of stuff out of the console. So I like to say kind of a go no go checklist policy of, you know, is the are these items on the network if they’re not on the network, like figure out why, you know, is there under voltage over voltage issue, check those kind of things. And I just being kind of a space nerd, I think, like we want to think about aerospace safety checklist, culture of checklists, you know, a preflight.

Analyst and think about, OK, if this isn’t working, we need to identify that problem before we get further in our day and it becomes more of a looming concern that’s going to slow down your your workflow.

I see. So in part two of your process here, modular verifications and calibration that it gets as detailed as here are all the things I’m expecting to see on the network. And so potentially, if this amp doesn’t show up and it’s throwing some kind of error, now’s a good time to solve that instead of moving forward and just hoping that it’ll get solved and then it becomes a bigger problem later on.

Yeah, I like to think too is like, OK, well, maybe there’s a problem with one of the amplifiers on House Left, you know, maybe you or someone part of your touring crew or whatever can look into that problem while you move on to a different task and then say, OK, let’s get that sorted out. Maybe I’m going to calibrate using the right side of the system, or I can move into another kind of part of the checklist, kind of chapter of the checklist, maybe verifying all the front of house outboard gear is working properly and set to the correct positions after being bounced for a thousand miles down the road.

Well, the problems being sorted out on on house after house. Right. But I guess I’d hate to see a situation where you start the calibration process and realize that a portion of the system’s not working properly or not working at all. Let’s just say, for example, like one circuit isn’t passing audio out of the system, and now you’re in a situation where the wavefront integrity of the system isn’t actually how it was predicted when you did the design in the morning.

So I think that’s something, you know, that we want to kind of avoid. So we’re not chasing our tails or making decisions out of out of incorrect data.

Sure. So. So these checklists are designed to help us remove as much human error and mistakes as we can. And so that’s what I want to talk about now. Like, I’m guessing that you have seen a lot of things go wrong and you’ve made mistakes, and that’s how you’ve really developed this complete process of how you should do preproduction and be prepared for anything. So I was wondering if you could share with us maybe one time that something has gone really wrong for you.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of a lot of good examples here. I mean, I think that some of this stuff is, you know, you like I think that one of the best things about touring is, you know, you kind of try some stuff and you say, well, that didn’t really work that well on this today. So we’re going to try to rethink that that strategy for tomorrow. And we’re going to do a better job of executing that plan in the future so you can take the whole rig down and reconfigure the system and kind of come back the next day and and fix any of the mistakes or any of the disadvantages of the system going forward.

But one of one of the actually pretty funny, I was on a tour and the pop star had an iPod, iPod mini for music, and this thing was probably five, six years old, out of date. And I yeah, I guess we have a lot at front of house. You have a lot of computers and there’s a lot of like record computers and playback computers and different computers running different levels of professional gear and prosumer gear and very consumer gear.

And so I get my eighth inch to excel or whatever doohickey we need to have to get this to plug into the console. And I hit play and I had some guests at the show that day. So this is kind of before doors and we’re chatting and back to catering and get get some lunch and and I get a call on the radio. So there’s a problem with the walking music, what’s what’s going on? And I go, OK, well, I’ll walk out there and and see what’s going on.

And it turns out that what I had done is hit repeat on that song instead of the entire playlist. So this Adele song played for like an hour and a half. And meanwhile, pop stars pop star’s Twitter feed is just blowing up with, like, what’s up with Adele Halcomb? Like, the song is on and it’s at a at the Hollywood Bowl. So it’s a pretty high profile show, so to speak. And and I you know, my clunky fingers had just clicked the wrong button and, you know, kind of entertaining guests and stuff.

And I had managed to put this song on repeat, put the song on repeat and and walked away to catering for a duration of time. And and now everybody in management, Don, was furious at me.

And it’s amazing. So long for someone to notice.

I mean, people noticed all over Twitter. It was a whole it was the whole thing. Twitter itself, you know, no one working there did.

Yeah, exactly. Eventually the management took me in the office and dressed me down pretty good about how stupid I could be. And so you get the you know, I think. Well, yeah. And I think that was kind of one of the gets more of a psychological or sociological kind of lessons for me was was you know, they came in and these obviously these managers are under a lot of pressure because it’s a pretty high profile show. And, you know, let me have it yelled at me for 20 minutes and, you know, told me how bad of a system engineer I was and sound guy and everything else.

And I and I just kind of I try to stay calm and I apologize. I’m sorry. It’s my fault it won’t happen again. And I just told them that I think the best thing was just to not to pass the blame, not to blame any of this equipment that we we were using. And it was entirely my fault for not maybe reading the instruction manual on the iPad mini from 2001. And, you know, one of those things where I just kind of brush it off and continue with my day and make sure that mistake doesn’t happen again.

You know, I thought that was a pretty good, kind of laughable, pretty low key kind of thing. But at the time it seemed like the end of the world.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, I was I was laughing with you about it, repeating over and over again until you started talking about the meeting where people are yelling at you, because then I’m thinking about the meetings I’ve had where people have yelled at me and I’m like, oh, God, I feel terrible now. Oh, but yeah, you said and that’s it’s so true. It’s so hard to not just try to make the guilt go away by directing it somewhere else, like, well, that person shouldn’t have given me an iPod.

That’s ridiculous.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think that’s one thing is OK, well, maybe we should kind of rethink how we’re doing this, rethink how we’re playing house music and, you know, use something is a little more professional and less prone to fat finger syndrome. Sure.

So that went on your checklist. If an artist ever hands me an iPod, figure out how to not use the iPhone.

Correct. And, you know, not to mention the thing, the twenty year old battery or whatever, you know, goes dads, you have to have some kind of adapter. And, of course, you know, Apple changes the the type of power connector every couple of years. So you have to, you know, dig around to find the correct adapter. It’s one of those things where a lot of professional gear, but a lot of times it’s a lot of consumer level gear that you’re using on these on these tours.

So so, vich, I’ve been trying to kind of keep my mouth shut and also maybe talk faster than normal because I usually try to get people to send me questions ahead of time. So I’ll post on, you know, LinkedIn and Facebook and say, hey, what questions you want me to ask Rick Wagoner? So many questions came in for you, like way more than I’ve ever had for any other guest. So either, you know, the acoustics product is either like, you know, very exciting or controversial or both.

But but people had a lot of things to ask you. So I want to get into those because I thought, you know, they’re good questions and also just, you know, want to want to satisfy people’s curiosity. So thank you for agreeing to talk about some of these, you know, some of them are kind of maybe too general. And so we’ll see just like what what how can we speak to them? But you’re used to this, so.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. Let’s dove into it. So, Kyle Mariotte, can he explain how they reached the public specs for Carra to please what stimulus for how long downhill with the wind, et cetera? And I put under here another question. OK, I’ll get to that in a second. So, yeah, he wants to know, like, the, I guess, measurement process for getting the things that then get published on the MAPP XT.

But there’s a lot of things on the spec sheet. So I guess I should’ve asked him what he wanted you to focus on. But so I guess you can pick like what do you want to talk about in terms of what goes on the spec sheet and how those numbers are arrived at?

Yeah, you know, there’s a I think one of the kind of things that we pride ourselves on our acoustics is doing a lot of critical listening. So I’ll I’ll kind of I’ll talk about some of the some of the kind of product goals I think about, you know, where do we where do we want a new loudspeaker or product that we’re developing to kind of fit in the in the marketplace or in our ecosystem or our kind of our lineup of of products, whether that be a series like one Kata Carta or the coaxial, things like that.

So I kind of think about what the what the form factor is going to be, what the restrictions are going to be, and then kind of start the design process. And then you want to specify drivers, elements and kind of loudspeaker enclosure sizes and things that are going to work out well for touring. And if that’s if that’s the market you’re going to going for and then. And then and then start development. I mean, again, we’re looking at some anechoic information, some interpretation between the different drivers and poller response and stuff that kind of happens at the R&D level.

But ultimately, I think what we what we like to do as a team is develop a system and kind of have a preliminary product and then, you know, have some listening and really kind of think, does this sound good at different levels? How does it sound coupled with different or proposed kind of a subwoofer system, things like that. So it’s a very, I would say, musical and kind of organic process and, you know, take some notes and think about different kind of features we might want to have, whether that be acoustic or kind of rigging bits or rigging features.

So that’s that’s one of the things. Now, again, Kartu is a little more complex as far as public polished specifications. Again, all these lines, source systems are elements that are coupled sorry. There are elements that are coupled within a larger a larger line source. So they don’t normally do themselves and that they do. We’ve got a couple feet fill presets, underscore F.I. would be in the in the preset library that are optimized to operate independently or by a single enclosure’s.

So when we’re thinking about this published specification, we really need to look in prediction to see how they operate cumulatively with other sources in Aline’s or other elements within a line source. So and then with carto there’s a D pad flex fense that allow you to adjust the horizontal activity. So I just pulled up the the specification sheet. I’ve got it here and I see that the maximum spell is listed at one forty two and it’s noted that this is defined with the car to 70 preset.

So what’s going on is those pen flex fins are in mechanically increasing sensitivity on the in the high frequency domain. So again, that’s, that’s how you get that higher SPL. But there’s going to be a different sensitivity if you go to a wider. So there’s just literally less surface area on the waveguide. If you go to in the case of two, you could go asymmetric 90 or 110 coverage. So I think you have to kind of think about what your design objectives are, think about how these elements are functioning within a line source, and that’s probably the best approach.

Okay, cool. I hope I hope that kind of helps answer the question.

Yeah. I mean, that wasn’t where I thought you were going to go with it, but that’s cool. It’s kind of like you, you almost have the specs ahead of time and you say, OK, what do we need to do mechanically, electronically to make this work out? Now, Kyle did specify he’s curious, like what stimulus was used and how long do you know what he’s asking for there?

I guess some R&D stuff would be, you know, looking at pink noise or looking at some sign sweep’s prescribing, I guess, kind of some fluid dynamics for Sabal for systems are looking at some more complex kind of airflow things in the porting. So, you know, I, I think without getting too kind of in the weeds as far as the R&D side of things, you know, there’s a variety of different different things that go into into place.

And a lot of it’s these days is done in production, you know, using kind of computer models and like I said, kind of fluid, fluid dynamics models to look at how things, especially for low frequencies, are longer wavelengths. React with importing and heat dissipation and thinking about Kresse factor, so to speak. So, you know, again, I think that’s one thing if if, you know, we wanted to get more into it, I could I could discuss that exclusively.

But I think there’s other people in the R&D team that could speak to this much more in depth, so to speak. Right. Well, I’ll just ask a follow up question from Lee Stevens then, who says, especially as they use the same components, Kyra, how have they achieved the extra? SBL So he’s saying that car and to have the same components and yet car has a different spell on the spec sheet. Is that what he’s asking?

Yeah, exactly. So what he’s asking about is this difference from output spel because of the different waveguide use or the flexible waveguide, the pan flex waveguide used in car two. So I think the important kind of term here is mechanical sensitivity. So we’re just increasing the surface area, increasing the radiating surface here and we’re talking about line source systems. And obviously that’s going to affect the horizontal so that the kind of the polar response, the horizontal coverage, like we talk about 70, 90, 110, but also but also allow you to kind of use this system to accomplish a different speed distribution goals, to maintain consistent speed distribution for most designs.

So that’s kind of how the components are the same. And I think one thing that’s kind of commonly known is this upgrade kit allowing you to put take your existing car and upgrade them to car two. OK, so we just changed that waveguide and then we use the same transducers or motor components to get the same results. Just the different waveguide allows us to get a little a little more extra spel if desired. Now, remember that this is in the high frequency domain.

So below 1000 hertz, the eight inch drivers in the car, everything is going to perform the same as far as output SPL. So we’re only mechanically increasing high frequency output as well because it has to do with the waveguide especially.

And since you mentioned waveguide, should we jump down to this kind of difficult question from EHV simit? Let’s see if you have anything to say about this. He says, I’ve asked this before during the release them of the car two and none of the staff on the convention or demo could give me a definitive answer. Can I combine Carra and Karuta in an array using the new presets or a combination of old and new presets? I’d love to use the upper boxes with the narrow dispersion in the lower with the car one which many companies are you have in stock because the boxes are the same except for the upgradable waveguide.

The No, you can’t do it, but I can’t explain to you why answer sounded me like he was just trying to sell the waveguide so would love to hear the technical details. Not everyone has the money to upgrade all their cars, stock and this way maybe with some price delay. So if I’m understanding this correctly, I think he’s kind of asking, can I do this without the upgradable waveguide if there’s some other preset as some other way to accomplish, is that how you’re understanding the question?

Yeah, yeah. Obviously it’s difficult because I love to tell customers and tell people that these, you know, engineers kind of. Yeah, anything’s possible and we’ll customize this and customize that. But remember that if you model an array and sound vision, so if we model legacy car with car two within the same wine source, there’s going to be different coupling and kind of final parameters. That sound vision is taken into account. And the software doesn’t allow you to combine those because there’s honestly different acoustic properties, different presets that are derived that have been updated between Kata and original Carra.

So the results would be difficult to predict in in sound vision. And I think that that’s that’s one of the things where there’s only so many kind of choose your own adventure logic flows that we need to we want to prescribe in sound vision because essentially the within the same line source, these these sources are going to act a little bit differently because of that different waveguide.

All right, I don’t know.

Yeah, but now I think what’s important to realize is that if you’ve got these Carra, let’s say as an outfit and then you’ve got another maybe like a 270 field and you’ve got another, like rehang fill in one’s cartoon ones, Kyra, we’re going to be able to predict those two systems and they’re going to have the same kind of sonic fingerprint that’s the same between the two sources. And that’s an important goal that to us to make sure that legacy car is going to sound similar or there’s going to be they’re going to be kind of backwards compatible when they’re used in independent source, independent sources.

OK, so I think that’s something where if he if he’s in a pinch and there’s a situation exactly like that, I could he could reach out to us and we could probably offer some recommendations. But again, it’s difficult because we don’t have the ability to. You can’t that’s not a logic path. And some and so it’s hard to we’re making a lot of assumptions about interferences in the near field without that information and sound vision. So.

Dave Gamon has a few questions for you, immersive sound is a huge new area of development. Do they see all large format production moving to the Lisa format?

Yeah, I like that question. And I like yeah, I agree. It’s it’s a huge it’s a huge new development. But the short answer is no. I think it depends on the priorities of the production, the artist, the mixer and even the vendor. So that’s kind of the short answer. So again, and I think one thing that’s just kind of go break down all of those again, the production, you know, may not be interested and their priorities may be and other things like video or automation, things like that.

So, you know, maybe that extra complexities or the, you know, changing from the status quo, I mean, a lot of that, that’s kind of a lot of the thing, kind of a lot of it kind of comes down to is just a diversion to change. This is the way we’ve always done it. We’ve made lots of money in the past. We’re not going to change anything in the audio department. And I think everyone in our industry has kind of heard that in various forms over the over their career.

So that’s one of those things. Again, the artist may not see this as something advantageous. So I think that’s one of the things and a lot of these decisions kind of do come down from production of the artist. Now, again, Mixu, I think this is a little more kind of in my lane as far as things I deal with a lot. So I think what’s important here is that many front house mics are developed kind of a resume and on their artistic abilities to manage comparative levels of inputs and then also work with kind of dynamic range and compression frequency response limitations that are suited to dual model mixes or stereo mixes.

So, again, if that’s kind of your niche on your resume, then the ease of use or the the high definition kind of deployment where it’s we’re dealing with more of an immersive mix or a spatial mix where that’s some of these things with carving a hole and the frequency response of different inputs and dealing with managing the dynamics, the limited dynamics of a dual mono system, especially when you’ve got a lot of inputs that arrive at the same band pass and same kind of loudness, you know, and you know, again, those are all kind of carryovers from the studio environment where we’ve got a stereo system.

The status quo is stereo, and we’re going to do different tricks to those mixing busses to get different things to stand out because our limitation is stereo or dual mono. So I, I think that’s that’s one of those things. And then obviously a vendor, that’s one of those things too. You know, again, the knowledge base of the vendor, that’s something that they might not be interested in pursuing. So, again, to assume that everyone’s going to adopt this technology right away, I don’t think that’s that’s a really personal I don’t think that’s an assessment that’s that can be made.

So he also wants to know why Elka’s decided to develop its own measurement platform. So you guys have the P1 meone now. And I guess he’s wondering why you did that instead of just adopting, I guess, any other audio analyzer out there, your smarts that live fire capture ET.

Yeah. So let’s see here. What do I start in the touring domain? I think that one of the things is basically blasting pig noise through for hours is pretty lame. It’s definitely disrespectful to other departments. So that being said is what can we do and what’s known about the system already? And, you know, there’s a lot of vertical integration with the acoustics ecosystem as far as the drive system to, say, P1 going to amplify controllers and then a preset that’s designed specifically for that speaker, the performance of the system, the total balance of the system is already known and prediction.

So there’s a lot of unknowns about the systems system already and a good amount of information kind of known about the atmospheric environment that the systems operate in it. So I think what can be said from there is that we we have so much information available that we just need to kind of build an environment or decision was made to build a piece of software to kind of automate that data collection, look at user evaluation and then kind of match that with the control capabilities already existent in our control into our network manager and network manager.

So that’s kind of where someone is born, is there’s all this data kind of already available and that improves the coherence or the quality of the transfer function. And I mean, again, other FFE analyzers, they’re good and they have a lot of functionality and they’re great. But they are assuming that there’s there’s so many unknowns about how that how the measurement compares to the actual performance of the loudspeaker that’s being tested. That looks interesting. Yeah, it does, because I’m understanding that it was actually the next logical step.

If the system already knows so much about itself and really the only the next missing piece is knowing what the responses of the system at this point where this microphone is and where that microphone is. But otherwise, it already had a lot of that information. So it wasn’t like you were building something from the ground up. You were really just adding. Another piece of the puzzle.

Mm hmm. Yeah, and I think I mean, there’s a couple other things where you can collect data and save magnitude data with minimal noise and more accurate acoustic stimulus. So you basically you’re going to run a bunch of sine sweeps, collect this data from a bunch of different measurement locations, and then you can use post-processing to really predict look at coupling, to look at equalization results with better statistical averages averaging because you can collect a bunch of information about the system at different places and see how the system is going to perform in the front of the room versus the back of the room.

And then, yeah, and then calibrate that system either connected to the amplifiers or do it offline. I know, like for a lot of installations and stuff, come in, collect acoustic data and then go back to the office and actually calibrate the system or do this online as well. You to the amplifiers and you’re pushing the system in real time, pushing settings to the system in real time, and then allowing the user to say, well, let’s see how you say I fired my virtual my virtual playback and I start listening to the system.

Lets see how these different options react in different parts of the coverage area. So I think that’s a good take away figure to optimize using these using them one for sure.

And just to wrap up, we are already getting into it. But Dave asks, why do you sign sweep’s for your measurement stimulus instead of broadband signal like pink noise? But you’ve already mentioned that it’s faster, so it doesn’t bother people as much and it’s a very robust stimulus. Is there anything else you wanted to add to that?

Yes. So this concept of kind of making sure the system, the transfer function is linear, you know, we obviously are going to put this stimulus into the system. It has a discrete asynchronous start time and it excites each frequency along the way. The transfer function in the phase domain and time domain can track that and compare that input to output, just like transfer function, transfer functions do or foot transfer functions. And so this results in a better signal to noise or a more linear response.

So obviously it’s up to the user. And part of that whole, like, validation process I was talking about is making sure that input stimulus isn’t clipping the inputs to the amplifiers or outputs to the amplifiers or you’re measuring microphones and things like that. So those are all important things to check before you begin. So I think that’s a better signal to noise. ISO is kind of the one of the bigger selling points and obviously results in better data collected.

OK, Tom McKean says COCOM why so COCOM is a proprietary cable connection multi pin system. Right. So I guess you want to know why you guys decided to to make your own so partially historical. Also kind of a reliability thing dating back to the Vidocq days, the COCOM. Com Connector was picked over, other ones, other types of connectors. So again, this is the for the era of in late Connector’s, I think back then it would have been up for pretty common or EP eight.

So if you guys have ever had the exciting job to climb some speakers or land and kind of correct any of these dodgy connectors, it’s can be quite frustrating. So I think that’s one of the things is we found that can actually be quite reliable and, you know, somewhat watertight, durable over the years of touring abuse and things like that. And I think anybody who’s especially in the touring world, you kind of get in the habit within Elate Connector’s or email for is putting this back twist on the cable so it doesn’t unplug itself when it goes up in the air.

So because maybe that little pin is a little locking, pin is missing or about to fall off.

Oh, yeah. And parts of the elastic, right.

Oh yeah. Yep, yep. And so if you’re doing a, you know, Canadian run and in January and, you know, negative 20 degrees and all that plastic is, Brid, a lot of loadout that you run the risk of breaking all these connectors. So try to get a solution to our customers. That’s not that’s less fragile in those kind of things.

Chris Prendergast wants to know how the waves culture technology has developed over the decades, specifically for acoustics.

Yeah, so I think there’s a couple things here. This is actually a lot to unpack because this concept’s been the same again, thinking back to some early 90s white papers where, you know, using this stuff, the physics hasn’t changed at all. But our ability to kind of look at more computer modeling, improve the industrialization process and scale that waveguide the technology, we’ve sculpted technology into larger products, into smaller products, evaluate things like harmonic distortion or things like that.

So obviously we’re able to look at that on the vertical domain, provide for the line source systems, kind of enthrallment angles that optimize on the vertical domain, and then also do better to control what’s going on in the in the horizontal domain. So like we talked about with Kartu earlier, is looking at introducing inflects, for example, where you can control not only output sensitivity of these line segments, but also also the activity in the horizontal domain and then obviously making sure that maintains consistent and predictable poller response that’s predictable and sound vision.

And then the sound vision results are translating accurately to that physical deployment. So I think a lot of it comes down to better information and more consistent results because of software development.

Behn Heaven, which says, in his opinion, what separates El acoustics from the rest of the pack.

And so I guess I’ll start one thing I kind of wanted to point out now from our the system calibration workflow from the Live Sound Summit will kind of start with some of the more technical things that I think system engineers can appreciate. So the systems are designed there, musically voiced loud speakers. There’s there’s inherently more low end or the available resources is there. We provide tools for you to adapt low frequency to high frequency. So generally speaking, you’re going to have the ability to have a full range system that’s going to perform musically and that kind of that takes place throughout the entire product range.

So that’s an important thing for us. It’s an important thing for for our users and allows us to be able to say I want to have the same frequency response for the file system as I do for the main system and still be able to use our systems and have the same musical response. Or let’s say you’re doing a stadium show one day and then you’re doing a ballroom show the next day, that frequency response is going to stay the same no matter what what products are using.

So that’s important to us. Another thing I just spoke on is kind of the prediction side of things. So we’ve got a predictable output frequency response and activity is linear at all, operating sensitivities. So again, we’re taking into account the system operating at very, very low output and then going up to its maximum output and still performing the same without breaking apart or port distortion. I’m sure we’ve all heard subs sound like they’re farting or something like that.

So we try to try to minimize that and make our systems as linear as possible. And I think touring that’s I see that a lot. And kind of going back to the in one conversation and looking at smart and things like that is you see a lot of people that calibrate systems at very low spell’s because it’s comfortable. And then the system is operating at very, very high speeds and portions of the systems system can’t keep up with or I should say other band passes of the system or other systems can’t keep up in the entire system, starts to lose its linearity.

And that’s where customers are front of house mixers or people start to get disappointed with with the performance of our systems. So that’s really important to us. I think that’s a thing that separates us from other manufacturers for sure. OK, so a couple other things. Then we talked about frequency response. And I think in my in my capacity right now, one thing I pride myself with and I know our team prides ourself with, is listening to customers, listening to users, getting feedback from them, thinking about new features and kind of quicker ways of doing things or better ways of doing things and quickly and consistently updating and making improvements to our software, which is obviously easy.

Just download new updates and I’ll say on this and many other people that we do these updates about every three months. So if you’ve been out of the software ecosystem, our software ecosystem for three months, it’s best to download whatever’s latest and read the release notes and then also the hardware. You know what? What makes these systems easier to deploy for people? You know, what are features that people liked people don’t like and try to, you know, listen to our our users, listen to our customers and make make changes fit their needs.

So I spent a lot of time listening to a lot of time taking notes and trying to feed that into the into the R&D team. So, OK, OK, cool. Stagecraft says, how do they design their presets?

OK, we talked a little bit about this with the car to question kind of looking at input stimulus, but I think what’s important about this is I’m just going to kind of go through the first part and we talk about this a little bit and we talk about it like in some vision where we have our pink noise as our stimulus and then we’re going to take into account amplifier headroom and then kind of Kresse factor to account for transients. And then we’re going to kind of design backwards or what is the what are the frequency response goals?

What are the the sonic parameters, like acoustic parameters with the loud speaker? And then what are the power supply requirements of the amplifier? What are the you know, what kind of transient information we need to have at all frequencies and specify specify transducers, specify an enclosure that accomplish those things, and then even down to enter element angles, kind of thinking about what what can we do to have a smaller system that has more flexibility with with total curvature, so to speak, within a light source while maintaining good WCT criteria.

So kind of thinking about that and then thinking about trying to keep things simple, trying to keep maybe a handful of presets like we said we use for Khara, there’s carto is like car 70, car 90, car 110. If you’re going to use that as a fill car, fill preset. And those have different parameters, but there’s it’s easy to like load that. And a lot of touring people these days are actually just designing the system in sound vision and then just importing this directly into a network manager.

And that carries all the presets that you’ve specified for the different use cases right in. So you can load that to your network to try to keep it simple. And then obviously a critical listening. So take this out. Have a listen. I have the R&D team and the design team kind of make adjustments to The Presets, obviously try to stay within a latency quota to account for other kind of fiber filters and things like that that are going on to maintain good poller response and then going back and kind of thinking about, well, you know, what can we do to improve this and then come out with the best product, best foot forward as far as The Presets and then after release, then kind of getting feedback and if there’s any kind of changes or improvements.

And I mean, this kind of happens as technology improves and predictive and measurement capabilities improve and try to try to make things that are going to be better and release new presets not too frequently. But if there’s a thing that we can make it make improvements from a software push, then we’ll we’ll explore that.

So be Meiners has a question for you and we’ll see if you have anything to say about this, because it’s I feel like we may need some more information. But he says how to achieve tonal balance with smaller liner, a six to nine caras per side with three elements at one AMP channel. So smaller system and kind of the maximum number of elements per AMP channel, it sounds like. Do you want to say anything about how you tonal balance yet now?

Again, you’re somewhat limited with three elements and a line source, especially in this case, Kyra, it’s a pretty you’re kind of looking at a point source behavior, especially in the low frequency domain. There’s not a lot of activity control in that example. So what I would encourage somebody like this to do is to take advantage of in sound vision. If you go to Target Toolbox, there’s a a second band pass view that you can look at any kind of I like to recommend a low frequency band pass so then you can look at frequency response across the audience from one to ten K and at the same time look at distribution of frequency response at a lower range.

So like seventy to like two hundred fifty hertz. And again, I find myself designing systems like this for small deployments and it’s important to think, to look at those kind of things and think, you know, what can I do to make sure that high frequency stays consistent or predictable with low frequency? I would definitely recommend that. And I guess kind of going back to the question about what what sets our products apart from others is we want to look and design the best mechanical solution before we go into the world of adding electronic coloration to improve a problem that was could be fixed with a mechanical solution that allows us to look at that stuff in sound vision.

I think that second band is a super useful tool. So, OK, so Christian Frederick has a question. I know where he’s getting this from. So there’s a lot of great training videos on YouTube now from acoustics. And I remember and one of them, we learn that with our acoustics gain shadings big. No, no. And yet you can combine sometimes different boxes in the same array. And so Christian says if smaller boxes are used for down at the bottom of the array, won’t that produce the same problem as gain shading?

Hmm. Yes. So that’s that’s kind of taken into account in the R&D process where especially in the high frequency domain. We have a lot of interferences between these different wave guides, so what we want to do is design a preset that has a constant latency. And when you load, let’s say, for the case of Q1 to Q2, when you load that K2 preset, that preset has the same phase response as the K one preset out of the box.

Now, in the case of, let’s say, if you’re going to do car to car below Kawan or something like that, you need to make sure you load that car down one preset to to to make sure that that those interferences are predictable and it’s not going to cause any kind of steering or anomalies in the wavefront. So we’re and I think what’s important about this is we want to encourage the use of mixed arrays or at least in my designs, my designs and kind of what I what I find flea’s for touring and rental systems is essentially remember that as we get closer to the front of the room we’re getting there’s the proximity to the system is increasing.

So obviously in the high frequency domain, the system is going to have higher sensitivity or higher output at that position in the front. So naturally, what we can do is use a box that has less output capacity. So, again, that speaks to the idea of going from one that has a higher output to reduce the output of the system by just mechanically switching to a less powerful loudspeaker. That accomplishes the same thing that would I think people have would have a tendency to use gainsaying against shading to accomplish.

Now, there’s kind of a parallel conversation with this is what we want to do is when you get close to proximity to a system, a lot of times we don’t have a lot of control over ultralow frequencies, depending on the geometry of the line source. But in the high frequency domain, we can use FLIR circuiting or sorry for attenuation. That’s constant latency is accounted for in the preset latency to reduce Aspell output in the high frequency domain. So we want to be sure we’re using that.

And if you’re calculating, call it auto FFR. It will take into account array, geometry, audience geometry and atmospherics. It will prescribe a set of fiber filters to normalize or reduce these kind of spots in the coverage area that are caused by high frequency building up because of the mechanics of the line source.

OK, so Dan Barrett says, how many toddlers does he think he can take in a fight?

Well, you know, like I said, growing up in the Midwest, I played hockey as a kid. And that was one thing I kind of learned is a lot of those smaller guys can run right around you. And so probably not very many. I’m a pretty big guy and I feel like they’d have a pretty massive advantage over me. So not very many.

So Tiago FIRREA for you, Artiaga. So Tiago, in one of the person stinting questions about the Katou in the car in the K3 and Vic and I were chatting before we started rolling today and we’re not going to cover those questions because those are actually answered in a product release that’s coming out tomorrow. So by the time this interview comes out, that program release will already be up. So Tiago and the other person have the question about the K3. Check out the acoustics website, and you should be able to find the answer to your question.

Christopher Patrick DPO Viks had quite the career being a system engineer for such notable mixers as Scovel and Pooch. If it’s in within reason to venture outside of the brown box realm, I’d be curious to hear his opinions on some other risks he’s deployed. I’d say most curious was Onya as that stands out above others, considering the flexibility it offers in some terms of DSP process control. And I’ll just point out that I think if people are interested, if I’m remembering correctly, you can find a YouTube video of Robert Psychoville talking about the system and I’m guessing you were involved with this.

Am I saying that correctly?

There’s probably there’s probably Robert talking about it and me running around frantically, you know, calibrating the system hours before sound check or something. So there’s there’s probably some hilarious footage of me running around an arena with a bunch of microphones and. Yeah, exactly. But to his question, I think I think one of the more fundamental kind of things that I’ve learned through these processes of dealing with different manufacturers systems is to reach out to the manufacturer and immerse yourself in their recommended guidelines and ask them the hard questions as what do you think I should do?

Like what manufacturer should I do to optimize these systems or to deal with these kind of concerns I have or deployment questions.

They want you to be successful.

Exactly. And they’re nice people and they’re going to you’re going to take time. You need to make sure you allow time to, you know, plan and bounce designs off of them and bounce ideas and not to be defensive, not to be, you know, kind of disarm yourself as far as put your learning cap on when you’re when you’re around these people to absorb as much information. And I think if you kind of use their. Imitations, you’ll get the best results and you know, you’re talking about Onya and talking about systems I’ve used with Pooch, I think that was the same kind of thing where there was a lot of new technology that we were testing out for the first time.

And they had recommendations. And I tried to be patient and use the systems exactly how they recommend.

OK, Nicodemus says stereo versus mono. If the stereo image is mainly enjoyed by only a few people, of the many in a live event, could a single wide dispersion line or a provide more uniform coverage?

Yeah, so I think it’s a great question. I think I guess the technical jargon would be, are these correlated or dB correlated input inputs to the system? So what are we doing? Are we looking at like feeding like a paging system or it’s a mono and is it a stereo send or is it something more complex than that? Like an immersive system or LCR is a topic of conversation often. So I think that, yes, that’s a huge problem with Domoto.

It’s a huge problem with stereo that it’s not optimized for the populace of the audience. And so we need to think about that in deployment. I think, you know, I just kind of say LCR, for example, it’s important to kind of think about that kind of thing, to have as much overlap between all three of these these sources. So as many people as possible are experiencing the localization of how you have things panned in that’s in that field.

Now, I think one of the great features of immersive mixing or Lisa systems is that it accomplishes that a lot easier than having to deal on a bunch of different bustline and things like that. There’s a bunch of different Netco uses the term this kind of single wide dispersion line source. So what we’re doing when we’re deploying these systems is we’re using a variety of usually like five five line sources or seven sources or something to provide that consistent coverage and total balance on the horizontal domain.

And then all of those sources are essentially overlapping coverage. So you can place an object in that environment and you can move it and it’s not going to change tonal that balance or or level as you move it through the sound field. Cool. So I think that that’s that speaks to Elisa, but I think that it’s important to think about those kind of things. Also important to think about temporal localization. When you’re thinking about filesystems, I mean, just remember that there’s always a function of delay and level where your brain is going to localize the direction of what sources heard first.

OK, so it’s complicated thing even for dual mono and LCR systems to think about. You know what that what how that’s how the bus comes into the system. Yeah.

Do you have any unique or interesting pieces in your work bag that you could tell us about something that you think other people don’t have or don’t know about?

I mean, I think most touring people kind of know about this, but it’s true. Paul Rangefinder, that’s kind of a standard thing. I think that, you know, always the question comes up in a lot of our trainings and and obviously for tours and stuff when that resumes is, you know, how do I measure the room? How do I gather room dimensions and create a quick model? So I think a true POS is a good thing, especially if you you know, you already have a room model.

You just want to verify its accuracy. You know, it’s easy enough to do that. In addition, carry a small tripod to put that true pulse on. So I think those are all kind of things that are pretty small and pretty easy to fit into a backpack.

The the one where the like the camera. And so it has a little screens you can like in the daylight. You can see what you’re aiming at.

That’s like a like I think the like a series has that this is more of a range finder kind of hand-held thing. And see Laser Technology Incorporated is the company that builds it and they say optical laser. It’s not a red dot laser. So it works through most kind of fog conditions. And I think as it goes up to about three hundred meters, so it works well for dark arenas to stadiums, which when it’s the bright sun out and things like that.

So other things in the work bag that I think are are very acoustic centric. I carry a P one with me. The P one allows me to use in one to calibrate carry a couple of measurement mikes the right now you can plug for for measurement mikes into the front panel like Prix’s of the P1. But I usually carry a couple spares in case one gets attacked by a by a chair, Carter a forklift or something.

So what makes you have.

That’s, that’s right. Now I simcock seventy one fifties. They’re just, they’re affordable, they’re pretty accurate and again the quality of these microphones. But when we’re compiling these information, this information, we’re relying on a variety of different measurement positions to produce our average. So the more average results you have of the system, if one mic has slightly different frequency response from another within reason, because we have so much average and information to the statistic, information is better.

So. That’s the thing, and then the other thing is a little spell calibrated to make sure those mikes are working properly and they’re all running the same sensitivity. So we don’t have bias towards one data set in the data collection.

Vic, is there a book that you could share with us that’s been really helpful to you?

Oh, yeah, those are some interesting, interesting questions. I guess academically, I think one of the things that I kind of kind of changed my opinion years ago about designing these systems and thinking about optimization is it’s called The Complete Guide to High End Audio. And this is Robert Harly. And I think the focus on this is more kind of high fi systems. But I think that the important takeaway from high fi systems is you’re usually accomplishing more with less.

So there’s less in the signal flow. You’re using really, really high quality components. And that way we don’t have to rely on a bunch of widgets to improve the frequency response or improve the desired performance of the system, because we’ve picked portions of the system or segments of the drive system or signal flow with the best possible pieces and the least amount of coloration or face shift or attenuation or headroom issues and things like that. So I think that’s an important mindset.

And, you know, people you know, people think I think a lot of this stuff kind of gets forgotten about in commercial audio and tours and stuff. And I think that’s really, really important because you’re going to get the best results out of the system and you aren’t going to have to do a lot of upstream signal manipulation to get the results you want. Second book, I thought it was kind of a good one to put on here is called The Idea Factory, and it’s it’s by John Gaertner.

And it’s about Bell Labs in the early 20th century, kind of through the 70s and 80s when Ma Bell was broken apart. And this Bell Labs, they kind of wrote the book on a lot of what we deal with in audio networking and kind of our references as far as how decibels work and how we’ve defined these kind of studio references over the years that we’ve adopted into the sound reinforcement field. And I think it kind of puts I like to kind of think of a lot of the problems that we think are unique to sound reinforcement.

The phone company dealt with the same problems years ago, decades ago. So I think it’s a good kind of humbling story of reading, reading through and kind of an understanding where the concepts kind of came from. Another book that I kind of want to just bring up that I thought was really, really cool is failure is not an option. Kind of goes back to my space nerd things. And this is by Gene Krantz, and he was the NASA flight director during Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

And he talks a lot in this book about building checklists and building redundancy systems into aerospace. No, no go, no go checklists, things like that. And I think that’s the mentality that we want to encourage and adopt for tourist applications. So that’s a good one is also, if you like, physics and aerospace stuff, it’s a good read, not to mention some crazy failure scenarios where they have to kind of move quick and make some decisions that could potentially equate to the life and death of a crew duct tape involved.

So, yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you listen to any podcast?

I do, I, I do listen to a lot of pop to know which ones you have to listen to every time they come out.

Oh man. I got, I got a couple for you so I’m going to leave the political podcast aside for this discussion. But one of the ones that brings me great joy is a podcast called Switched On Pop. And what these guys do is they just dissect pop music or take a song or a genre and kind of unpack it and talk about why pop and what makes it what makes it interesting to listen to and kind of the evolution of the story and what it means as far as songwriting and and and so on from there.

So that’s a good one. And I also think that for a lot of this stuff is having a good understanding of musical instrumentation. And I think that’s a good place to kind of start thinking about arrangements and think about how that translates to how songs are recorded and how the public or the masses kind of perceives how a pop song should sound and thus how a system should be deployed for sound reinforcement.

Well, Vic, where’s the best place for people to follow your work?

I think the best place these days, you can definitely acoustics on our website, you can go on there and go to contact and find a picture of me and my email and shoot me an email and my phone numbers on there as well. I think you give me a call day or night and we. Yeah, oh, any time now I never sleep. But no, we try to I try to keep try to keep our our customers in any kind of interesting projects that we’re working on.

We definitely post on our social media in L.A., the best sound on Instagram and everything like that. So try to keep a steady flow of tushy in the pandemic times, positive and uplifting things kind of happening on a daily basis.

Well, I’m glad you said about people contacting you because we had so many kind of listener questions today that I think if, you know, if Vick didn’t answer the question the way you expected him to or there’s more information that you want or I didn’t ask it the way you wanted it, so you should reach out to him and then, you know, and then email me and let me know what he said, because I’d be interested to know as well, because I realized as soon as we get into the interview, this always happens.

I realize, like I think I know what this person wanted to know, but I’m not totally sure. And so I don’t really know if I’m steering the conversation in the right direction. So reach out to Vick. He’s a super nice guy and he has contacts on the website. So Vick Wagner, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

Oh, it’s good to chat. I loved it. So glad to get the information out there and have this discussion with everybody.

My most popular posts of 2019

By Nathan Lively

In 2019 Sound Design Live had 206k unique pageviews from 107k users, 330k video views for 23k hours of watch time, 75k engaged users on Facebook, and 131k plays on SoundCloud. It looks like video is starting to outpace the podcast in terms of maximum outreach.

Based on number of unique visits and time spent on page:

  1. How To Tune A Sound System In 15 Minutes (updated)
  2. Dave Rat’s End-Fire Adjustable Arc Subwoofer Array Explained
  3. Dave Rat’s Simple Problem Solving Mindset for a Long Fulfilling Career in Pro Audio

Based on total view in YouTube:

  1. How to Time Align Your Main to Your Front Fill Using Smaart® Live IR
  2. How to maximize gain before feedback of a podium microphone using Smaart®
  3. How to Measure Room Modes and Standing Waves with Smaart®

Based on number of lifetime engaged users on Facebook:

  1. Learn how to flatten phase in 5 seconds.
  2. Three Speaker Placement Mistakes That Make You Lose Vocal Intelligibility
  3. How an improperly connected motor cable arced up the chain and almost ended in disaster

Based on total plays on SoundCloud:

  1. If you’re using audio over IT, but you don’t know how it works, you will fail.
  2. Real World troubleshooting tips for wireless microphone and In-ear-monitor dropouts and interference
  3. This secret weapon will make a Profile sound like no other Profile you’ve heard before

What would you like to see more of in 2020?

6 Smart, Proven Methods To Control Feedback Onstage (Without EQ)

By Nathan Lively

sound-design-live-how-to-control-feedback-in-live-sound-featured-image
sound-design-live-how-to-control-feedback-in-live-sound-evil-monkey

There is nothing worse than spending an entire event struggling with feedback demons. You may have been taught to fight feedback with a graphic EQ, but there is a better way. Actually, that’s not true: there are six better ways. Use my guide to controlling feedback onstage and mix in fear no more.

“The feedback frequency is determined by resonance frequencies in the microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker, the acoustics of the room, the directional pick-up and emission patterns of the microphone and loudspeaker, and the distance between them.” –Wikipedia

Method #0 – Psychology

I had to include this step 0 because the more I thought about it and the more I talked to other sound engineers, the more this came up. When it comes to improving your GBF (gain before feedback), start with the beginning of your signal chain and work forwards.

Example 1: Jason works as an AV tech on city council meetings. He was having lots of feedback problems and asked for my help. After we went through everything in the signal chain and made improvements where we could, the most important change we made was simply explaining to the council members the importance of proper microphone positioning. Nothing else we did made more of an impact than getting that first step right.

Example 2: When Brian Adler works as a monitor engineer in situations where he expects the GBF to be an issue, he will purposely start with vocal mikes way too loud in the mix. This will give the performer a little shock and start the sound check off by asking their mix level to be turned down, instead of what normally happens.

Probably the biggest tip I can give in this area is to be proactive and be a pack leader. You don’t want to wait until the stage is all set up and you are halfway through the sound check before you approach the guitarist about potentially moving his amp for a less face-melting experience. Instead, while you’re giving them a hand loading in, mention that “What we normally do here is put the guitar amp on this stand so that you can hear it well and I can get a better mix out front.”

Or for vocalists: “We’ve found that the ideal position for the monitor is with this microphone in this position. If you want it to be somewhere else, I’m totally fine with that, but it might not be able to get as loud, so we’ll have to work around that.”

Method #1 – Microphone Placement

Close Miking

For loud stages and busy rooms, close miking is generally the way to go. It might not always be the best for sound, but for the maximum gain before feedback, you have to kiss the mic. Remember, with each doubling of distance, sound level is cut in half. Plus, if you’re working mostly with Shure SM58 and SM57 microphones, that’s how they are designed to be used anyway.

For corporate audio this usually means teaching your presenter how to handle the mic. For theatre this means adjusting headworn capsule placement. I have seen sound designers successfully mic a play without headworn microphones, but it’s tricky (see How To Mic An 800 Seat Theatre With Floor Mics).

Polar Pattern

sound-design-live-how-to-control-feedback-in-live-sound-polar-pattern
From SoundOnSound

For concert sound you almost never use an omnidirectional mic. Microphones with a cardioid pickup pattern have the most rejection at the rear of the mic capsule, which should be pointed at the stage monitor.

Don’t cup the mic! This will defeat the directional pattern, turning it into an omnidirectional mic.

Corporate and theatre events require specific and stable placement of the microphone capsule. Some sound engineers argue in favor of using omnidirectional capsules on the grounds that they are easier to place and produce more reliable results with the movement of the actor. My experience is that none of that matters when the audience can’t hear the actor because you can’t get enough gain.

I’ve done a lot of musicals and concerts with omnidirectional head-worn microphones in the past, though, and it’s always a struggle. The performers can’t hear themselves, and if the audience starts clapping or singing along, chaos ensues. Why did I do this? Because it was what I had available. These days I try to let directors and event producers know way ahead of time about the limits of working with certain equipment. If possible, I’ll schedule a test so they can hear the difference in the performance space.

Method #2 – Speaker Placement

Stage Monitors

Floor wedges should be placed on-axis and as close to the performer’s head as possible. I’ve heard people suggest moving the monitor away from the performer for better gain before feedback, but don’t do that. That just creates lower sound levels at their ear level, so you’ll have to turn it up louder. Most live stages are loud enough as it is, so anything you can do to lower the stage monitor level will be helpful.

how-to-control-feedback-in-live-sound-hotspot

Have you ever seen those little Hotspot monitors? I haven’t seen them in a few years, but I love the idea. Put a small monitor on a stand and you significantly reduce its distance to the performer.

Sometimes, because of sightline issues or stage layout, you can’t get a monitor right in front of a performer where a cardioid microphone’s off-axis point is. This happens often with drummers and keyboard players whose instruments take up so much space and lead vocalists who want clear sightlines. This is when you need a hyper-cardioid or super-cardioid microphone and this is why many live music venues have a collection of Shure SM58 (cardioid) and Beta SM58A (supercardioid) microphones, or similar.

If you find yourself stuck with a drummer or piano player whose stage monitor is at a 90° angle to a cardioid microphone, try cheating the microphone out closer to 45° to get more rejection. If an artist requests a monitor position that is less than ideal for your microphone selection, go ahead and do it, but warn them that you may run into feedback problems and need to reconfigure the speaker and mic.

I’ve seen some pretty creative microphone and monitor placement that allow for very high gain before feedback. If you are working with acoustic instruments, ask the performers if they have any tips for placement. I used to work with a cello player in Portugal who placed the stage monitor a little behind himself so that it wasn’t pointed at his microphone but it was still aimed at his head. It worked great.

Stage monitor placement for theatre deserves its own article, but my number one tip is to start the conversation early. Explain your limitations to the production team and discuss ways to best accommodate the actors. You don’t want to realize in tech rehearsals that the actors can’t hear the musicians and that the director won’t allow downstage speakers. I often lobby for small downstage monitors straight out of the gate. I also try to make friends with the set director and builder as quickly as possible, alerting them to the fact that I’ll probably need help hiding speakers around the stage.

FOH

Make sure your FOH speakers are covering the house and not the stage. This means checking the speakers’ off-axis angles to make sure they are not spilling onto the stage or creating strong wall reflections. (See also: How To Tune A Sound System In 15 Minutes.) I’ve heard people say that all microphones must be at least six feet behind FOH, but I’ve seen it done many different ways. Some situations call for more separation and control, others less.

Method #3 – Instrument/Source Placement

sound-design-live-how-to-control-feedback-in-live-sound-drum-shield

If you are working with a loud rock band and you place the lead vocalist right in front of the drummer, guess what happens? Your vocal mic will be full of drums and your vocalist won’t be able to hear. This happens all the time, and explains why you see the bands on Saturday Night Live using a drum shield on that very small stage.

Your goal is to balance every source input for the performers and audience. Now let’s talk about the most frequent offenders.

Drums

Drums are loud. Some drummers are interested in harmony and balance, and will change their technique, use brushes, and dampen their instruments. Those drummers are in the minority. Why? Well, have you ever played drums? It’s fun as hell to play loud, and boring as shit to play soft, or so goes my personal experience.

If you’re on tour, you’ll need a rug and a drum shield. If you’re full-time at a venue, put absorption everywhere. Two of the noisiest venues I’ve worked at have pulled the same trick and covered their ceiling and walls with black semi-rigid duct insulation or vinyl that screws right into the wall. It made a big difference.

For more on this topic, see 5 Pro Drummers Explain How to Make a Drum Kit Quieter on Stage.

Electric Guitars

I’m a guitarist, and as such I’m fully aware of how hard it is to hear myself without the amplifier blaring. The only way I was able to handle this in my band was to learn to play without hearing. In the real world, getting a guitarist’s amp as close to their head as possible will help. Put it on a chair or milk crate. Most are open-back, so put a bunch of absorption back there.

In my interview with Larry Crane he mentions a guitarist who built a Plexiglass shield for his amp that redirected the sound upward at an angle so that he could play with feedback and do fancy things with his amp without blasting the stage. Pretty smart.

sound-design-live-how-to-control-feedback-in-live-sound-guitar-amp-doghouse

I worked on a show last year where the guitarist made a shield for his amp from case lids and jackets. This helped it not bleed into other microphones as much.

Buford Jones is famous for doing whole tours mixing from inside a truck outside of the venue. (He’s even more famous for mixing some band called Pink Floyd.) These were large venues where they had little acoustic sound coming from the stage. The guitar amps where all in dog houses off-stage and all of the performers were on IEMs (in ear monitors). Most of us won’t experience that, but it gives you an idea of how far people will go to control sound levels on stage. If you are worried about approaching a guitarist to discuss changing their setup, just remember that asking them to turn down their amp and put it on a stand is nothing compared to removing it from the stage entirely.

Method #4 – Mix

Stage Monitor

Most performers these days are wise to the challenges of microphone feedback on stage and will make specific requests for their monitor mix. I’ve made it a practice to not add anything to a stage monitor mix until expressly asked to, except for vocalists who almost always need reinforcement. When musicians walk in the door saying, “Just give me a mix of everything,” they likely don’t know what they need. Smile and nod.

I’ve made it through entire shows without adding anything to some performers’ stage monitors because the stage layout allowed them to hear everyone. I’ve also worked on shows where the band has skipped sound check then walked on stage expecting a complete mix. I try not to work off of assumptions and I give people only what they need, because the lower your stage volume, the better your FOH mix will be, and everyone will be happier.

FOH

In small to medium venues, you aren’t “mixing” in the classical sense, you are doing sound reinforcement. You are balancing the acoustic energy in the room for a more pleasant musical experience. From my interview with Howie Gordon:

The other thing I hear a lot about [is] guys setting the whole mix base from the drums, and in my opinion that’s the last thing you should do because the thing that immediately suffers is vocals. It’s the one instrument that can’t control its own stage volume. -Howie Gordon

And from my interview with Larry Crane:

How many times have you been blown out of the water by the mains because you’re trying to keep up with the stage? It’s like, “No, no, no! That’s not necessary.” You’re not building the mix up from the kick drum at that point. You’re building the mix down from what’s happening on the stage, and you’re filling in what’s missing, just a little bit. -Larry Crane

If you need definition on the bass guitar, roll off the low end and mix it in. If you are missing the melody from the keyboard, bring up the right hand. If the guitarist is too loud then invert the polarity and lower his volume in the house with deconstructive interference. That’s how noise cancelling headphones work.

(Just kidding! You know I’m kidding, right? If you actually try that and it works, keep it to yourself.)

Compression

Normally, I love compressors, but they raise the noise floor and reduce dynamic range, and therefore reduce gain before feedback. I would really like to use compression on lapel mics during corporate presentations, for example, but I’m often on the verge of feedback and can’t spare the gain.

Method #5 – The Holy Grail

IEMs, e-drums, synths. Done! 😉

Method #6 – Don’t Give A Fuck

“These setups that we’re working on, there’s EQs everywhere. If there’s still feedback, it’s too loud. So lower it or let it ring all night. I don’t give a fuck.” —Dimitris Sotiropoulos

I laugh every time I read this quote, but there is plenty of truth to it. Half of what I write on Sound Design Live is about psychology. People don’t trust sound because they can’t see it. That also means they don’t trust you because they can’t see what you’re doing. Letting the monitor feedback for a second before you bring it down communicates to the artist that it has reached it’s maximum level and that you are turning it down.

Q: But you do use EQ, right?

A: Um, yeah, most of time. At least to attenuate some low end.

#ObligatoryBonus – EQ

This is your last tool in the war on feedback. Use high-pass filters to remove the rumble from guitars and the proximity effect from vocals. Use narrow-band filters on a parametric EQ to surgically remove problem frequencies. Although it’s your last step, it’s also necessary. Temperature, humidity, and performance changes throughout the night will require compensation.

I recently worked with a sound engineer who would cut the low end from all of his vocals up to 200Hz in the stage mix. That’s a lot! But it worked. A few years ago I worked on an outdoor event where everything would be balanced during the afternoon sound check, then explode into feedback at night because of environmental changes.

So I think we can agree that some amount of EQ is necessary, but watch out for assuming too much. There is a process that we sound engineers call “ringing out the monitors” that often takes place before any artists have arrived. We use this process to lessen the amount of time we will need to chase feedback during sound check. I gotta tell you that over years of working on live events I do this less and less. Why? Because if you do it before sound check then you are making a lot of assumptions about the sound that can all be ruined by changing a mic or its placement. You’re also making changes to the speakers’ performance and sound quality without due cause. A better technique is to test for feedback, make note of those frequencies, but hold out on makes changes until you need more gain.

I sort of hate the fact that “ringing out” is supposed to be a normal part of our job. Under normal circumstances, with high-quality equipment and a properly optimized system, you shouldn’t have to do this. The fact that it is a normal part of our job makes me realize that there are a lot of sound systems out there that need your TLC.

Pulling half the bands down on a graphic EQ is like removing a tumor with a wiffle ball bat.

sound-design-live-how-to-control-feedback-in-live-sound-graphic-EQ

If this is the first article you’ve ever read from me, you may wonder what I have against graphic EQs. For system EQ, their fixed frequency, bandwidth, and logarithmic spacing make them unhelpful. They maintain popularity until today because they seem to give you a visual (graphical) representation of the changes you are making. Unfortunately, the visual is misleading. While you appear to be making surgical incisions, you are really making ⅓ octave tonal changes. You can prove this to yourself by measuring one. Here’s a step-by-step guide.

I hate graphic EQs. I don’t use them unless I don’t have a better choice. You’re talking about ⅓ of an octave. That’s like a C to an F on a piano.

Michael Lawrence – Fighting Microphone Feedback WITHOUT a Graphic EQ While Mixing Monitors from FOH in a Reverberant Room

Basically, the only things that graphic EQs are good for are ear training and maybe use in the battlefield that is Monitorland. For more, see my interview with Dave Swallow, my interview with Bob McCarthy, and my review of McCarthy’s book.

Another consideration is where you will insert these EQ filters. Your first idea might be to insert them on the master output buss of the mixing console. Consider that this has global repercussions on the entire mix. You are affecting the system response and mix balance. If possible, scale your changes back to the smallest local change possible. Is the feedback originating from a single microphone to all outputs? Insert your EQ on that microphone’s input channel first. Is the feedback frequency present to varying degrees in all vocal microphones? Insert the EQ on the vocal buss.

In the world of my dreams, I would be able to insert filters on a per-send basis from each input channel for maximum transparency. Unfortunately, the only way I know to accomplish that on modern mixing consoles is to create a duplicate input channel for each send, which is overly complicated.

Ambient Changes

Humidity and temperature changes throughout the night will require compensation, especially if you are outside. My first big lesson in this came will working for the band O’QueStrada in Portugal at an outdoor concert at the Centro Cultural de Belém. I had all of my monitor mixes set just on the edge of feedback, which seemed fine during soundcheck. We came back that night to start the show and as soon as I unmuted the band I also unleashed a storm of microphone feedback. 

At the time I didn’t understand that a rise in relative humidity at that location would result in less high-frequency air absorption. I could have compensated for the change in humidity with a high-shelf filter.

The lesson: Don’t mix your stage monitors to the edge of feedback if you expect a rise in relative humidity and be prepared to compensate with a high shelf filter.

Temperature changes are less obvious. It would take a a 20ºF change in temperature to produce a 2% change in the speed of sound, which may be only enough to shift your acoustic crossover point by one seat. Unless you are working outside with some very large changes in temperature, I wouldn’t worry about its affect on microphone feedback.

Other Tricks To Try

Feedback Eliminator

If you look up reviews for feedback eliminators they are almost equally bad and good. You never see them on professional productions. Part of the issue is that sound engineers don’t like things to be out of their control, but the main problem is that these units just don’t work that well. Everyone who has used them has horror stories.

That being said, sometimes pro audio feels like a war zone, and I will never judge you for using one. Especially for corporate events where you have several lapel mics walking around a stage and you only need to stop one frequency from feeding back on one microphone for three seconds at a time. Or small setups where you are very limited in the way of EQ.

Frequency Training

Imagine the show-stopping seconds you could save if you could identify feedback frequencies immediately without using an analyzer. There are some nice apps out there that will train you to identify frequencies. This is not the same skill as having perfect pitch. It’s pitch memory and anyone can learn it. Most of them train you using the 32 bands of a standard graphic EQ, which isn’t ideal, but is a great place to start, helping you avoid a frequency-wide sweep. I’ve used Audio Frequency Trainer and Quiztones. Read more about my experience here: My Results from 30 Days of Ear Training.

Microphone Splitter

sound-design-live-how-to-control-feedback-in-live-sound-y-cable

Don’t have a digital mixer or a separate mix console for the stage? Try splitting a few channels for more control. Let’s use the lead vocal microphone as an example. Right before it comes into the mixing board, connect a splitter or use a Y cable for the most basic passive version. This will give you two copies of the lead vocal coming into the mixing board. Mix one for the house, mix one for the stage. This will allow you to roll off way more low end then you normally would and make other adjustments to the stage mix without significantly affecting the house.

Polarity and Delay

It has been suggested to me that you can invert polarity or add small amounts of channel delay to get more gain before feedback. I’ve never had success with this. It just moves the feedback to a different frequency, makes it attack slower, or makes no change at all.

Separate Speakers

From the Meyer Sound Design Reference by Bob McCarthy ©1998:

One solution is to double the number of stage monitors and separate them into music and vocal systems. This has the advantage allowing for separate EQ and, in additon, the musicians find it easier to localize their voice and their instruments since they come from different positions.

Thanks to ra byn for tipping me off to that one.

Turn Down

While on tour with Ringling Bros., I found that in some arenas I had GBF for days and in others I could barely get the main vocal up above the band. Our system and performers being the same, I had to accept the fact that my headroom changed from week to week. The audience didn’t know it was different, so as long as the balance was good I could adjust the overall level as necessary.

Conclusion

Your best tool for controlling feedback in live sound is stage layout. That means microphone placement, speaker placement, and instrument/source placement. Then you can work on the mix and if you still can’t get enough gain before feedback, use EQ. If you’re lucky, you’ll work with a synth-pop band (call me, Active Child!). If you’re unlucky, challenges abound, everyone’s a dick, and you just let it ring all night, cause fuck it.

What are your best tips for fighting feedback on stage? Comment below!

How To Tune A Sound System In 15 Minutes

By Nathan Lively

sound-design-live-professional-sound-system-setup-15-minutes-MAPP-8k

Even professionals often skip sound system setup and go straight to mixing because there just isn’t enough time. Unfortunately, you can’t go directly to your artistic place without first passing through science. The good news is that even the smallest amounts of time can be put to good use. 

How? With a plan.

Simple Sound System Goals

The goal for tuning a sound system is very simple: manage interactions to reduce variance across the listening plane. Put another way: provide the same sound in every seat. Setting the master EQ for perfect sound at the mix position does not meet this goal. Instead, we need an order of operations to help us make changes that will benefit the entire listening area, or at least mitigate damage. The order of operations is:

  1. Verification
  2. Placement
  3. Aim
  4. EQ
  5. Crossover alignment

It might seem like you don’t have 15 minutes to spare to check all of this, but the most important items are listed first. Completing a few is better than nothing.

You will need a dual channel analyzer like Smaart, SATlive, SysTune, Tuning Capture, RiTA, Open Sound Meter, etc..

Here are the speakers we need to set up: (2) CQ-1 (wide coverage main), (2) 650-P (2x 18-inch sub) in an uncoupled symmetrical point destination array. It’s your standard left/right mains situation (see diagram below). This is the most common professional sound system setup that I run into; it is not good or bad, just common. 

Our job as a waveform delivery service is to minimize phase distortion that causes comb filtering. Comb filtering makes a swooshing sound in the high frequencies as you move your head and should never be fed after midnight. Unfortunately, any array with speakers facing in towards a destination will produce some amount of combing. We would prefer a single CQ-1 and 650-P flown above downstage center to match the room. This design often doesn’t happen because of hardware and time limitations. I could complain about it and waste your time, but those speakers will still be sitting there, bored as hell.

Download the MAPP XT project if you would like to follow along with each step.

Disclaimer: This is a highly simplified example with minimum microphone positions to give you an idea of the structure for verifying and calibrating a professional sound system. There are many factors at play and details that I do not cover, like how to operate an analyzer. For a more in-depth analysis of this subject listen to my interview with Bob McCarthy.

Minutes 0-4: Verification

Do you think a lighting technician starts running a show without making sure that each instrument responds at the correct address? No! Better make sure all of your speakers play what they are supposed to play.

  1. Set all outputs to unity.
  2. Play pink noise and isolate one speaker at a time. In this setup we are unable to solo individual drivers, but do it if you can.
  3. Is the left output playing from the left speaker? If not, track it down. Many times it’s just a case of faulty patching. If you’ve got lines wrong inside of a closed box, you’re going to need more than 15 minutes, so I hope you have a backup. Repeat for each speaker/driver.
  4. Listen. Are there any obvious problems like noise, distortion, or Left and Right sounding different?
  5. Measure phase response on your audio analyzer at on-axis of each speaker/driver. Confirm matching relative phase. A phase offset of 180° indicates a polarity inversion. Any point in the signal chain could cause a polarity inversion so either track it down or simply invert phase anywhere else so that they all match in the end.

This step is the most important. It will be a sad dance party if your subs aren’t working.

Placement

In this situation there’s not much we can do with placement. We would like to move each speaker closer to the center of its coverage area, but we have a stage in the way and no rigging hardware or points.

Minutes 4-8: Aim

We only have a single measurement microphone, so we’ll need more time on this step to move it between positions. If I were running late and needed to cut one step from this process, I would cut this one and instead estimate the aim with a laser.

  1. Compare Main Left solo at OFFAXL and OFFAXR.
  2. Adjust aim until OFFAXL = OFFAXR in the HF (high frequencies).
  3. Repeat for Main Right.

Minutes 8-12: EQ

  1. Measure Main Left solo at ONAX and set output EQ filters to match your target trace.
  2. Listen to the filters in and out while playing your reference tracks. Are you going in the right direction?
  3. Copy the Main Left output EQ to Main Right output EQ.
  4. Measure Main L+R at ONAX and set EQ filters to return system response to your target trace. 
  5. Listen.

Minutes 12-15: Crossover Alignment

  1. Measure Sub Left solo at ONAX.
  2. Compare to Main Left solo. Are phase measurements within 60º through the crossover region? If so, move to step 7. If not, fix it. (for more, see How to verify main+sub alignment in Smaart)
  3. Measure MainL+SubL and check the combined response to make sure you have summation throughout the spectral crossover.
  4. Apply any necessary combined EQ.
  5. Listen to the result with your changes in and out. 

This is a stripped-down example of one of the most common sound system setups that I have encountered in the field. It skips steps and makes assumptions, so use it at your own risk. There is a lot more to do to be thorough, but I wanted to demonstrate that even a small amount of time can be put to good use.

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