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Post subject: Most complex setup yet; learned a lot.
Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2012 10:41 am
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Aspiring Musician
Aspiring Musician

Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2011 7:24 am
Posts: 434
Yesterday, I had the most complex and educational gig yet. It was a contra dance in an art gallery. The venue was long and narrow with all vertical surfaces being old brick and glass, a hardwood floor and a complex, exposed-beam ceiling with the horizontal beams maybe 8-9 feet above the floor.

There was a row of columns with sculpture filling in the space between the columns running the length of the hall, slightly to the left (viewed from the performance end) of the center of the hall, so that four dancers holding hands at near arms length, facing the stage would have maybe three feet to the brick wall on one side, and two feet to the columns on the other side. The same four dancers might have a foot to either side in the narrower space on the left.

Most of the night, the dancers all danced in one long line in the larger space. One dance, they split into two short lines and danced in both spaces.

The instruments were:
Mandolin, with an internal pickup to 1/4" TS.
Fiddle with a pickup in the bridge to 1/4" TS.
Button accordion with two built-in microphone pickups near the reeds on each side, all to one XLR, requiring phantom power.
Piano (synth keyboard playing acoustic piano voice -- stereo output) to two 1/4" TS.
Trap set drums (a bass-drum mic aimed at a small hole in the bass drum to XLR, and a side-facing condenser mic mounted high, aimed down at the area of the drum tops to XLR requiring phantom power).
Caller (female spoken vocal, hand-held wireless mic) to XLR.

On stage, there are special monitor needs because the drum set is by far the loudest acoustic sound, and the mandolin/fiddle/accordion player is standing between the drummer and the piano, and he can't hear himself over the drum. The keyboard player has a small monitor amp in line with the left/mono channel, so she can hear herself, but she also can't hear the mandolin/fiddle/accordion over the drums.

I had suggested that he could plug all three of his instruments into one of my Mackey SRM 150 monitors in line, so he'd have just himself in the monitor, and he could adjust levels to whatever he wanted, and I could daisy-chain a second SRM 150 to the keyboard player, and they could adjust levels to whatever they wanted, but he never liked that idea and gave me several reasons that eventually made enough sense to me that I went out and bought a Mackey FX8 line-level mixer just to give these two musicians the monitor mix they need. I want them to be happy and sound good.

I wanted an hour to set up. Long, country roads and traffic gave me a little more than half that much time, so I didn't have time to really wrap my head around the room's special needs, and I set up like I usually do with four speakers (Fender Passport 300 Pro and Fender Passport 500 Pro) at the performance end of the hall, aimed at the dancers. This was a mistake.

While the dancers accepted it as being about as good as the sound was last year when a PROFESSIONAL sound guy with a large van full of very expensive equipment (he probably brought his 32-channel mixer, because, why the heck not?) did the sound. Meanwhile, it was not up to my standards.

With the sound a few decibels below feeding back the trap set mics, bordering on pain for the dancers nearest the speakers, by the time I walked 1/3 to half the length of the hall, sound quality was degraded by room acoustics. Echoes and volume drop-off made me not smile, and it got worse the farther down the hall I walked. At the far end, it was functionally borderline. I could understand the caller if I really tried, and I could "hear" the music, though I couldn't really "feel" it.

It was an all-day dance (3:00pm to 11:00pm) with a break for pot-luck dinner, so during the dinner break, I moved the speakers. I usually crank the speaker stand legs out to their widest spread for stability, but to reduce the trip hazard, I pulled them in to maybe a 2-3' radius, which is still plenty for such well-centered, 15-pound speakers as come with the Passports. I love the Passport speakers. I really, really, REALLY love the passport speakers.

I have the two pair of short speaker cables that came with the Passports, plus a pair of 30' speaker cables, plus a pair of 50' speaker cables, plus a pair of female-female 1/4" adapters to make longer runs, so I combined a 50' and a 30' cable for the most distant speaker that was a bit more than 3/4 of the way down the hall. The next speaker used a 50' and a short cable. Next was a 30' cable. The last used a short cable.

I pointed the nearest one slightly down the hall so that the tweeter spread just barely covered the dancers closest to the performers, then pointed the most distant speaker so the tweeter just barely covered people in the back right corner, then cheated the two middle speakers to progress from one end angle to the other. I also dropped the speaker stands down two notches so that the larger speakers in the cabinets were at face level, so treble distribution was at people near the speakers instead of being over their heads. I usually mount them higher because you don't want dancers near the speakers blocking the sound from dancers farther down the hall, but with this arrangement, dancers were usually less than 15 feet from a speaker with maybe one dancer between them and the speaker, so this was not an issue.

The improvement in sound was dramatic. It did require me to rewire things a bit. I pulled both ends of the cable from the right channel of the keyboard so it switched to "mono" mode, and I moved the caller from the 300 Pro to the 500 Pro, where everyone else was patched in. Normally, the instruments go into the 500, where I can record the band without the caller, then I add the caller into the 300 because she can be heard just fine coming out of only half the speakers, and she won't be in the recording (which the band likes a lot), but with this speaker arrangement, it was important to run mono all the way. So, I pulled out my Olympus L15 digital recorder and patched it into the Tape Out on the FX 8 mixer so it only recorded the non-drum instruments. Everything else went to the speakers in mono.

The only bad sound issue was that the drums were so loud acoustically, that at the far end of the hall, you could hear everything else through the speaker, but then hear the slightly delayed drum (delayed by the time it takes sound to travel the length of the hall). I file this under something I can't fix, and something the dancers don't seem to mind much. The band's other drummers are a bit more subtle, and this wouldn't be a problem for them.

The Mackey mixer requires a lot of mental focus because nearly every channel has unique features. They call it an 8 channel mixer with built in effects I'll never use (hence the name FX8), though I consider it a five channel mixer with two mono and three stereo channels. Oh, and two of the channels have no gain control for 1/4" inputs, and four of the channels have XLR inputs. Yes, it gets complicated. So, here's how I patched it, with channel numbers as the start of each line:

1: Mandolin with the Hi-Z switch off. This is the only channel on the board with a Hi-Z switch.
2: Fiddle. This is the only mono channel with no Hi-Z switch.
3/4: Accordion. The gain control on this channel works for XLR, but not 1/4", so since this was the only instrument with XLR connection, this got channel 3/4.
5/6: I skipped this channel. Like channel 3/4, it's a "hybrid" channel that has a gain control that affects only the XLR input, but is fixed at "Unity" level for either mono or stereo 1/4" inputs.
7/8: Keyboard. With the initial speaker setup, I used two 1/4" TS cables for stereo, but with the later speaker arrangement, I disconnected the right channel, using only the Left/Mono channel so all four speakers got the same sound from the piano.

The big surprise of the evening was that with the speakers spread out so far, while walking down the hall, I could really hear the difference between the Passport 300 and the Passport 500 more clearly than usual. With flat EQ and this acoustic band, the 300 definitely sounded clearer. The 500 was slightly muddier. I could match the sound with EQ and volume adjustments.

No surprise, was that the 500's sound improved when the overall Tone control was cranked slightly treble -- moved from noon to maybe 1:00-1:30. But the real surprise was that I had to turn the 500 up a little so that the LED stack showed almost one more light than the 300. I say "almost" because the lights are not in perfect synch and what I mean is that sometimes the 500 shows one more light, and sometimes they both show the same number of lights. The 500 is slightly louder, not judging by the Volume knob, but by the LEDs. Volume gets complicated because it is adjusted in several different places.

Anyway, with the 500 slightly louder and cranked slightly more treble, for acoustic music, it can be indistinguishable from the 300. Apparently, in this frequency range and volume range, the 300's 8" speakers are more efficient than the 10" speakers on the 500. Other kinds of sound sources at other volume levels might come to different conclusions about this. Sound reproduction is pretty complicated.

I drive a Honda Fit, which is officially categorized as a sub-compact. I pack my wife's keyboard, her monitor amp, my two Passport systems, two spackle buckets full of cables, two speaker stand bags (two stands per bag), a mic stand bag (six stands), a large tool box (for AC power cords and all the small adapters, mic clips, etc.) a folding table, the separate mixer, a bag for the two wireless mic systems, a mic case for six microphones, and a few other misc. items, like lunch, my wife and myself. If the Passports were any larger, this wouldn't work.

If they were heavier, they'd be a major pain to get from the parking lot to the venue. The 15 pound speakers are a joy to mount on overhead speaker stands. If the handles weren't so fat and comfy, or if the cases had sharper edges on them, they'd be a physical pain to carry. The sound quality matches or betters sound other guys get from systems with thousands of watts costing tens of thousands of dollars because those systems are designed for outdoor use or for much larger venues than I play for.

Basically, I wouldn't be doing sound if it weren't for the Passports. Seeing the Passport in a music store, I got the idea that I could do sound. This system would work for me. Everything else has grown from that. Many thanks to the engineers who put this together. You've made a positive change to my life.


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