The drum overhead actually became useful for a change.

So, there I was.

The classic situation was unfolding. A loud-ish (not insanely, just loud-ish) rock band is playing in a club. A club that was brand new. A club that they could have built any way they wanted, and apparently, what they wanted was a splatterfest-inducing set of hard surfaces, and a load-in that was all stairs.

Geeze, lou-FREAKING-weeze. Guys, you could have had anything, and THIS is what you ended up with?

But, yeah, the classic situation.

The main vocal is running at high gain to get some semblance of intelligibility, and it IS working out in general. Of course, between songs, it's either duck the fader or get that little ring of feedback trying to poke through. I was tired of ducking the fader. Not that such a thing is so strenuous, but weren't machines supposed to save us from boring repetition? I think so.

I knew what I wanted my console to do. When it was quiet on stage, I desired that the fader on the main vocal to come down a bit. When the band kicked into gear, that level should go back up to where it had originated.

"A gate can do all those things!" I thought to myself. But how to determine when the players had come to a stop between songs? Ah...yes! The drum overhead! The drum overhead, useless to me in this room as a sound reinforcement device, had suddenly gained utility. It was a perfectly adequate sensor of the band being loud or quiet.

So, there you go. I set the main vocal's key source to the overhead, tweaked my threshold, attack, and release, and initially set the range to yank the lead vocal level down 10dB when the gate was engaged. (I might have changed that to 6dB later).

All relatively easy, if your console has the tools in the toolbox, and you know what you want those tools to do.

Noisy folk increase your need for PA output.

“How…how can this not be loud enough?”

That was my thought as Pixie And The Partygrass Boys launched into their set for the Shredfest afterparty. At soundcheck, I had been concerned that we were running too hot, and also that the overall mud and mush of the room were too much. I had dug a big hole in the midrange trying to fix it, and I had felt pretty successful with the whole endeavor.

That was working against me now.

(I also needed more trim height on the main PA, trim height that simply wasn’t available.)

What had changed, of course, was that we had a gaggle of merry-makers in the room who were there to demonstrate precisely how they were the incarnation of those who ski and party. (You can’t if you don’t, as some of you may well know.) We didn’t have enough of these humans to change the room’s reverb time in any way that I could perceive. What we did have was enough to absorb some of the PA’s output, especially with the loudspeakers having only their HF horns above head-height.

We also had more than enough to make a rather surprising amount of noise in the midrange band of the audible spectrum. You know, human voices and all that.

What I needed was volume. Sheer power. More gain was part of the answer, but I only had so much of that available. Gain before feedback in that room, with the PA deployment on hand, and my original EQ curve applied – well, that was anything but unlimited. What I had as a real option, then, when changing my overall tonal balance. I needed more energy in the “crowd roar” band, because that was the area being masked by all the…you know…crowd roar.

I made my overall EQ solution flatter, and I got on the gas. I got the show about as loud as I could reasonably get it, and it ended up being just about loud enough to get us through. I don’t get into a lot of shoving matches with audience noise, but apparently when I do it works out like this.

Too much toe-in on the primary speakers can cause you problems later.

This summer, I encountered some deployment issues when using outfills to cover extra-wide spaces. They occurred when I was a little too aggressive with my “toe-in” of the main loudspeakers.

A bit of toe-in or crossfire on mains is often a handy thing. It helps to fill in the center, which can sometimes get a little lost if your mains are a good distance apart and fired parallel to each other. What can happen with outfills in play, though, is that a listener hears the outfill nearest to them AND the main on the opposite side at a similar intensity.

If you’re thinking that sounds like a recipe for major phase issues, you’d be very correct. The effects are not subtle. It’s clear that you’re listening to multiple arrivals when the sound is a transient (like a drum hit), and the combined sound “blows in the wind” dramatically. One show had a fair bit of air movement to contend with, so much so that we actually had some mishaps with speaker stands. When standing in places with interfering coverage, the wind kicking up would completely obliterate the high-end of the PA. Further, there was a general muddiness that couldn’t be fixed with EQ.

So, what’s the fix?

The best solution is to reduce the crossfiring of the main coverage. What you want is for the folks listening to the outfills to overwhelmingly hear those outfills in comparison to your main coverage. Getting the nominal coverage pattern of the mains away from the outfill zones helps with that greatly, while requiring no tricks with delay or gain. It’s not that delay can’t be helpful, it’s just that it works best at specific places, and less well otherwise. Physically-accomplished coverage provides a far more consistent experience across the audience.

A mix of mixes can sometimes be exactly what you need to get out of a bind.

The way I mix is often “distributed.” That is, I have at least an inner pair of loudspeakers and an outer pair. Generally, the inner pair gets vocals and the outer pair gets instruments.

Now, of course, what happens when you need outfills for an amphitheater (like at the Millcreek Summer Jam) is that you want a total of eight speakers: Inner main, outer main, inner fill, outer fill. What’s really a bummer is when you discover that one of those eight speakers has a failed HF driver.

So, after you pull down two boxes such that your outfills are a single loudspeaker each, what do you do? You could set up another bus, so that all channels go to the outfills AND one of the main pairs, but what if you want the outfills to reflect the results of processing you do on the primary buses – EQ, compression, and such?

The answer is a matrix. A matrix system lets you create a mix of mixes (i.e., a bus fed by the output of other buses). It’s very much like subgroups that feed a main bus, though with far more flexibility. All I had to do was combine my inner pair and outer pair buses into a matrix, and connect that matrix to the fill loudspeakers. As easy as you please, the show was back on track. Summer Jam saved!

An apples-to-oranges comparison still reveals a few things.

Bobby Solis of No BS Sound picked up a couple of DR110DSP loudspeakers (a new Behringer offering) for light-duty applications, and of course I wanted to get a sense of their performance. Graciously, Bobby lent me a unit and I proceeded to run test tones through both it and a reference unit – an Alto TS312, to be exact.

To start, I’ll say the obvious. This was an apples-to-oranges comparison. The Alto having a 12″ LF driver makes for a rather different package. Obviously, an Alto TS310 would have been a better box to have a shoot-out with, due to a closer similarity of design. Even so, we can have a conversation about the results.

What I did for this comparison was to set up a ground-plane measurement in my garage, with the measurement mic about 10 feet from the loudspeaker grills. As best I could, I tried to find the input level on both loudspeaker units where their built-in limiters would kick in, and measured with that setting in place.

So, what did I learn from looking at the graph you can see up there?

First, a TS312 can play about 12 dB louder than a DR110DSP, on average.

Second, the DR110DSP is a bit peakier overall in its frequency response. This comports with what I hear when I use one, especially at frequencies above 1k: 2500 Hz tends to pop out, and there’s a bit of a rasp at 11 – 12 kHz. This is similar to sonic experiences I remember from the EV ZLX series, which the DR110DSP seems to be built to compete with in terms of electronics. (Interestingly, the Behringer aesthetics seems to be trying for a QSC feel.)

In terms of whizbang features, the Behringer does have a clear edge if that’s what you want. Built in Bluetooth streaming is pretty neat (and saved our bacon on a show a few days back), plus the onboard DSP offers a lot of sound-shaping options. I do appreciate having the ability to set a clearly repeatable master volume, though a continuously-variable input gain undoes that advantage a bit. An Alto TS312 is much simpler on the back panel, and some folks might see that as a disadvantage. I personally prefer my powered speakers to be a bit spartan in their control offerings, though, so the Alto fits me more readily.

So, if what you want is DSP and onboard Bluetooth, but not necessarily a ton of volume, the Behringer seems pretty okay. What I need is output and a better from-the-factory tuning, which is where the Alto leads. Even so, this evaluation was much more about curiosity than hard science. It would be interesting to find an Alto TS310 to run against the DR110DSP on a more even playing field, but I didn’t have one handy.

If it will satisfy your peak power requirements, you’ve got a winner.

So – you’re being asked to handle a gig, and the event organizer wants to know a couple of things. First, do you need a generator? Second, how big does the generator have to be?

I always feel that I need a generator if the power situation gives me any pause at all. There’s one outlet available from a building we don’t have access to? That needs a generator. We’ve got power available, but every other vendor at the event might be hooking into it? That needs a generator. We have to run more than 100 feet of cable from regular-ol’ outlets to even reach the stage? That needs a generator. The event organizer is offering to rent a generator because of “prior experiences?” That needs a generator.

So, needing that generator for reasons including, but not limited to, anything or everything above – how much capacity is required? There’s a relatively easy way to get a good number on that front.

On the audio amplification side, tally up all your peak (not continuous – peak) draws. For powered speakers, you can do this by taking the manufacturers peak-power claim at face value. If they tell you it’s a 2000 watt loudspeaker, call it 2000 watts (within limits, because that little HF driver isn’t going to have a 700 watt peak applied to it). For passive speakers, the manufacturer’s claim for the peak wattage at the nominal load you’ve hooked up is the number you want.

Got all that? Great. Now multiply by 1.1 to account for life not being 100% efficient. This is the power needed for your audio output, which is variable over time. After that, total up your other power draws, like mixing consoles and processing. Those units require a fixed amount of power at all times, so you don’t need to account for momentary spikes of demand. For lights, use the highest power-draw number you can find. (For instance, an LED lamp might pull 100 watts, but if you’ve got the lamp on full AND are panning and tilting like crazy you’ll use more power. The motors require energy too, right?)

Here’s the “why” of my being so focused on peaks and other “highest case” draws. When you’re running on a generator, the capacity of the unit is all you have to handle everything that can possibly happen. This is in contrast to when you’re on the municipal grid. When connected to the grid, there is generally a huge power delivery capacity for momentary draw. If you try to pull 10,000+ watts all of a sudden, that’s likely not much trouble for the “megawatts to spare” municipal supply. With a generator, though, there’s no extra capacity. If the unit has a maximum load of 5000 watts, trying to pull 10,000 is futile. The power doesn’t exist. As such, the safe thing to do is to take a good stab at figuring your highest possible momentary draw, and ensuring that instantaneous load can be handled.

By way of example, let’s take a system that I was involved in deploying recently. There were two, double 18 subs that could draw 2000 watts each, plus two tops handling the same amount of power. Add three monitor wedges with 2000 watt peak ratings, and you get 14 kW. Multiply by 1.1 and you have 15.4 kW for loudspeakers. There was a bass amp that could probably deliver a 1kW peak, and a 100 watt guitar amp, so that gets us to 16.5 kW. There were also two mixing consoles needing 120 watts each, and a processing rack that consumed about 25 watts. At this point, we need 16.8 kW. Add about 500 watts of LED lighting, and we’ve reached 17.3 kilowatts.

What the event gave us was a 20 kW diesel generator, which was perfect. The peak power available was in excess of what we needed, and our continuous draw (per the unit’s ammeter) was about 10 amps. We had no power problems with the generator itself, running as loudly as we pleased for several hours.

The conclusion here is, there’s no need to finagle and guess what you can get away with. Instead, spec comfortably and then work with confidence. It’s much better.

Nozzles increase fun for everyone.

My dog LOVES it when we play with the hose. She gets soaked which is the BEST, and she gets a drink, which is the BEST, and she gets to pounce and jump, which are also the BEST.

I like it when we play with the hose, because it gets me thinking about audio nerdiferousness. (“Nerdiferousness” is definitely a word, because I just made it up.)

Making the hose fun requires a nozzle, and this is similar to loudspeakers for live music. Making live-audio speakers fun also requires a nozzle (a horn) for the high frequencies, at least for the conventional enclosures that most of us use. As usual, it all comes down to an impedance problem.

The hose isn’t very much fun with the nozzle removed, because the pressure delivered to the dog is too low. There’s no lack of motive force to get the water out of the hose, and indeed, running without the nozzle gets a greater volume of water to transfer out of the hose and into the environment on a second-per-second basis. The thing ruining all the joy is that the hose output impedance is quite high, and the input impedance of the world outside the hose is very low. That is, the tubing has a pretty small cross-section in the grand scheme of things, and that cross-section very suddenly turns into an effectively infinite cross-section when the hose ends and the rest of the world begins. Without a tremendous amount of pressure behind the water – far more than the municipal supply can provide – the water merely tumbles out the end and doesn’t travel very far.

It’s entirely similar to an electrical pathway. Motive force (voltage) or pressure drops as flow travels across paths offering resistance, with the motive force dropping to zero at the end of the circuit. If a high-resistance pathway is followed by a low-resistance pathway, more of the voltage is lost across the high-resistance component. The bigger the difference, the larger the drop. So, if a high-impedance hose directly couples to the very, very, VERY low impedance of the world around it, the pressure drop between those two environments is basically all the pressure available.

The point of the nozzle, then, is to increase the apparent impedance between the hose-end and the world. It does this by restricting the output flow. The force behind the water doesn’t change, but the apparent pressure is greatly increased due to that force being applied over a very small area. So, if we’re willing to accept a smaller coverage area, we can get a high-pressure jet that the dog finds highly amusing.

It’s very similar with horns and loudspeakers. A loudspeaker driver, particularly a high-frequency driver, can make plenty of pressure. HF driver’s are also high-impedance devices from an acoustical standpoint. They’re much “stiffer” than air. The bugaboo, then, is that the world beyond that HF driver is very low impedance. The available energy flat out transfers poorly when there’s a sudden transition between the driver and the environment. Just like the hose, if we’re willing to accept a smaller coverage area, we can create a better energy transfer situation. The horn changes from a restricted space to a less restricted space over a certain amount of travel, which means that the environment the driver directly couples to is much higher in impedance than an immediate change from itself to free-air. It’s a much more efficient use of the available energy. The gradual transition results in rather more pressure transfer from the horn to the outside world in the first place, which is exactly what we need for a live-audio application.

You are not going to fit everywhere in the industry, and everything in the industry is not going to fit you.

It was just a few months ago that I was on a Zoom call that featured a gaggle of audio industry notables. Big-league folks. People that you may actually have heard of. The call was in regards to a new service available in the industry, and how it might work in the future. (I’m being vague because I don’t know the status of the service in terms of public availability.) At one point, I piped up about a feature that wanted; it would have made the service very valuable to me.

“I don’t think that should be offered. That’s just not what the service is for,” said one of the other participants.

Let me tell you, there is no feeling exactly like being shut down in the full view and hearing of leaders in your business. Encouraging ain’t what it is.

If it would have been at an earlier point in my career, I might have felt a bit crushed. That’s not how I felt, though. Stung? A bit. Disappointed? Yes. Embarrassed? Certainly. Not devastated, though – because over the years I’ve come to realize some truths about myself and the industry.

First: Even among oddballs, I’m an oddball. My approach to the production of live music, and the business of live music, is different from a lot of the other audio humans out there. Look at this website: I’m not interested in one more review of one more piece of gear that’s only incrementally different from everything else. I’m not interested in a “bag of tricks” mentality. I’m interested in strong basics, making the physics work for you when you can, and then choosing to NOT fret over everything else. I’m interested in getting results through means that are unconventional. I’d rather have fun and be able to experiment than slavishly chase after the shows, gear, and deployments that are industry standard.

(Knowing the industry standard is appropriate and helpful, certainly. However, there comes a time when you see the limitations and would prefer to redefine the standard, rather than run after it.)

Second: Industries are not made “for” oddballs. When something becomes commoditized to any degree at all, there is a certain safety-in-the-known-middle that takes hold. The services and attitudes that grow up in the industry, then, inevitably serve that known middle. This is NOT some sort of failing! It’s simply what I would call the physics of the business. If you don’t fit neatly into that middle ground, a lesser concentration of products, services, conferences, camaraderie, and approval will be “for you.” This is the same everywhere in life, to be brutally honest.

And so, with these truths in hand, you can make decisions about what you want at both large and small scales. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing the “known middle” if you find it satisfying. If you DON’T find it satisfying, though, you have to develop a comfort in not being catered to or understood at all times. Not everyone is going to get the proverbial “it” of what makes you tick, and in order to function long-term you’ll have to accept that.

Careful, there’s a lot of subjectivity out there.

At some point, you are going to be buying some gear online, and you are going to look at the ratings and reviews.

(I very nearly typed “rantings” instead of ratings, which would have been funny and also somewhat accurate.)

There are times when the various missives, epistles, and sometimes even novellas written by your fellow purchasers are very helpful. There are times when they are blatantly unhelpful. There are also times when their prose SEEMS helpful, but actually isn’t.

The thing to look out for is subjectivity – and when scanning for that subjectivity, recognizing that unverifiable information can be very sneaky.

An easier example to start with is a, say, 2-out-of-5 rating with a statement like, “It doesn’t sound like a [x] watt speaker at all.”

Okay, all right, so…what does a [x] watt speaker sound like? I’ve been doing this for quite a good while, and I really couldn’t tell you what a [insert watts here] speaker sounds like. I could give you an estimate of how loud I think a loudspeaker with, for example, 2 kW of input might be able to get in these modern times, but my assumptions might be very different from that of the reviewer. That is, when I see a loudspeaker advertised as “[x] watts,” my immediate assumption is that I’m looking at an instantaneous number and not anything that could be sustained. Is that what our unhappy reviewer thought? Maybe that was a continuous number in their mind. How do we know?

Since we don’t know, we can’t put too much stock in the person’s dissatisfaction.

Then there are the folks who say, “It has no headroom.” Again, what are they expecting? Are they even using the thing the right way? There are people running around out there who don’t know how to read a dBFS meter, and are blasting the converters of digital consoles thinking that 0 dBFS is treated the same way as 0 dBu. Some folks will clip the input side of a powered loudspeaker and raise a ruckus, never realizing that a master volume control got bumped down.

Another wrinkle can be found in, “The stupid thing died after one gig.” This one is more tricky, because a device absolutely can, objectively, die after one round of serious use. Manufacturing and post-manufacturing defects can and do happen. You have to ask yourself, though, about what the preponderance of evidence shows. If there are a squazillion instances of that unit out in the wild, and a handful of cases of swift death, is that really a disqualifier? The more copies that are made and shipped, the larger the absolute number of failures that can occur. Furthermore, who’s the most likely to raise their voice about something? There are a lot of satisfied folk who say nothing, but disappointed people have a higher tendency to complain.

So, with reviews, it’s good to be generally suspicious, read between the lines, and look for themes. For one person, a product will be amazing, and for another their expectations won’t have been managed correctly. If a person has a bad experience with a piece of gear, and you don’t get the sense that they know what they’re doing, don’t put too much weight into what they say. You shouldn’t totally discount it, of course, especially if the review basically sounds coherent, but don’t give it more credit than it deserves.

Coil excess cables in a distributed fashion, rather than collecting them together.

Every so often, I’ll either get the explicit question of “where do you want the coils?” or I’ll work with someone who has a different concept of it than I do, and I have to make my preference known.

And, of course, I have a ready answer to where one ought to put those (hopefully) neatly-wound excesses of XLR, TRS, power, and whatever other cable we might have at work. “Put ’em at the mic stands and monitor wedges they belong to,” says I, and off we go towards another evening of music. But what’s the logic? How might we generalize the concept?

Well, first, we don’t want a big, messy pile of excess cable that we can’t sort through easily. (If there’s a connection failure or a mis-patch, this can become a major factor in solving the problem quickly.) Second, we want to be able to re-arrange the stage with the greatest ease possible.

Those needs work out to a pretty simple demand: That coils of excess cable ought to be arranged in a distributed manner, away from any common termination point, and as near to the distributed termination point as safety, functionality, and aesthetics allow. Whether the cable is being used for input or output is immaterial.

In the case of an input-side run (for a mic or DI box, say), this means that the excess is coiled near the bottom of the mic stand, or next to the DI. This distributes the excess away from the stage box (the common termination point), and puts it near the mic or DI, which is the distributed termination point.

For an output-side run, like to monitors or main loudspeakers, the coil should sit at the side or back of the loudspeaker – whichever is less obstructive to controls and patch points – because the loudspeaker is the distributed termination point. For stick-mounted loudspeakers, it’s the same as mics on stands: Put the coil on the ground, near the stand.

Having the coils at the distributed termination points makes those items easier to move. Because the cable “feed” is close to the object being set in a different place, the rest of the cable run, and the other cable runs near it, can be relatively undisturbed by that move. This is a BIG help when you’ve got a lot of cable on the deck. If you do things the other way, feeding more cable to get to a more distant location means a lot more disruption of all the other cable. Plus, if the big pile of cable gets tangled (and you know it will), you may not be able to pull more length easily. Distributed coils stop the big-tangled-pile problem from even starting, as your feed point for more length is already away from everything else.

Further, by keeping the coils separate and therefore “readable” in terms of what they belong to, problems are easier to fix. When all the cable piles up at the stagebox, replacing a bad line or fixing a patch that’s in the wrong spot is a chore. You have to sort out which cable is the right one in a giant ocean of samey spaghetti, and then try to make your fix without turning the whole pile into an even bigger mess. With a distributed approach, it’s much easier to follow a line from the coil to the patch point. The separation between cables is far more apparent. Plus, when you pull and replace the connector, the disturbance to the other cable runs is minimized.

So, yeah, the short answer is “put ’em at the mic stands and monitors,” but the question of where all those coils go has a good bit of philosophy behind it.