Members OneEng Posted June 25, 2014 Members Share Posted June 25, 2014 Well, last weekend we played the annual Michigan Scorpions motorcycle club party. My typical complement of FOH speakers consisting of a pair of PRX618S-XLF's and a pair of DSR112's was simply not going to be enough, so we also put out my drummers CVA118's and CVA28's as well. The clubhouse had just built a new stage. It was a very nice structure and all wood (roof and 3 sides) with ample room up on stage. We initially put the speakers up on stage with us, but immediately found we had a SERIOUS low frequency resonance issue up on the stage! After a bit of playing around with some settings, I gave up and we put the speakers down on the ground. That cured the LF feedback problems completely. We don't normally have the FOH setup like this, but then again, we don't normally play for 500 people outside either.... or try to cover sound over an area the size of a football field. While the LF feedback went away, we found we had some HF feedback which appeared to result from issues with running 2 different kinds of tops together (CV's and Yamaha's). Hadn't actually thought of this side effect before, but splaying the CV28's out to the side more to minimize the overlap with the DSR's cleaned that issue up. Ahh. So now we could actually turn the rig up without either LF or HF feedback When I first got my X32 Rack, there were so many features and so many capabilities that I didn't understand. Once I understood them, I thought I would never use them. Last weekend, I used some pretty interesting features. I wanted full range signals going to both sets of speakers on each side of the stage. In order to accomplish this, I used 4 matrix sends. I sent the L+R output to these matrix sends, then routed them to 4 of the XLR outputs on the X32 Rack. This gave me the ability to independently control the output to the Cerwin Vega powered speakers and the PRX/DSR powered speaker stacks. It also allowed me to put a 6 band PEQ on the Cerwin Vega speakers (the PRX/DSR stacks didn't need any eq to my ears). We ran a quick sound check, recorded it, then played it back while I walked around different areas out front and modified the eq on the CV stack as well as balancing the output between the CV stack and PRX/DSR stack. It sounded really good. I was surprised at how much bottom I was able to get from 4 subs. I ran them all night with the clip lights flickering on and off, but they performed like a champ. The subs didn't seem to fight each other either. Sure, I would have preferred 6 XLF's and 4 DSR's (which would have been a great combination for this gig), but this mixed setup did a very nice job in combination with the really cool features I was able to utilize on the X32. The only problem I had all night was that my iPad ran out of juice just before the last song of the night because my rotten daughter had been playing with it and boosted the brightness clear up ..... and I didn't notice. It was still not a bad showing for the iPad Mini. With the screen blasting full on, it made it 5 1/2 hours straight. I will be paying closer attention to the brightness setting next time I am getting good at maintaining a good mix through the IEM system and the X32 Rack remote iPad app. We are getting a really consistently good performance now that I have had 6-8 months of working with the system to get the hang of it. I still have the issues I reported with my lead guitar player's volume control; however, it has gotten much better. Now that he can hear the virtual sound checks, he has been getting his leads boosted more constantly. I have also gotten fast at making adjustments to his volume when he is too low. He still goes through the night all over the map in volume. I see his input go from -6db to +6db throughout the night and have to make some pretty serious changes to his channel volume to compensate. This is certainly not as good as having a dedicated sound man (and I can't get Andy to come out to Michigan for free ), but I am completely content with the consistency we have obtained. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members mikekars Posted June 25, 2014 Members Share Posted June 25, 2014 Hey it feels pretty good to apply your accumulated knowledge to a new and awkward situation and turn it around into a win. Give yourself some credit! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members agedhorse Posted June 25, 2014 Members Share Posted June 25, 2014 Good job! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Art Flood Posted June 25, 2014 Members Share Posted June 25, 2014 Good one OneEng. A lot of hard work has paid off! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JV90 Posted June 25, 2014 Members Share Posted June 25, 2014 Great OneEng Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members OneEng Posted June 26, 2014 Author Members Share Posted June 26, 2014 All my many years of accumulating and trading gear with the great advice of the experts here on HC has definitely paid off. I have a very small wish list these days. I keep thinking my GAS is cured Next on my list is one of those 6 space SKB roller racks for my mixer. I am currently re-purposing an old heavy duty wood and metal amp rack that has 2 handles per side and is designed to carry those old and heavy non-switching amps ..... where you would actually need 2 men to carry an 8 space amp rack The thing is, the rack weighs more than the gear I am now putting into it! I just replaced my tube amp with a Kemper rig, so I really have a very light weight, high quality band rig that is very easy to setup and get sounding good. This last weekend was one of the largest shows we have ever done (yea, we are a small time hobby band for sure). We sounded pretty fantastic though, and we got 5 new gigs out of it.... including an invite to a couple more biker gigs from different clubs. As it turns out, lots of bar owners are in motorcycle clubs Thanks for the nice thoughts guys. Hey Andy, have you ever heard of feedback being created by using unmatched tops like that? From the numerous conversations about comb filtering and phase alignment, I guessed on the fly that splaying the speakers out a bit more might fix it (again thanks to all the great conversations and information I found here over the years). My PRX/DSR rig never feeds back by itself. It hits limit way before any hint of feedback, so this was a bit of a surprise for me. I also hadn't thought about a huge boxed in wooden stage having such a strong natural frequency down low like that. Of course, I will never be able to say that ever again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Pro Sound Guy Posted June 26, 2014 Members Share Posted June 26, 2014 Good job on the Matrix and separate filtering on tops! The CV is a 128db box The Yamaha is a 134db box Keep that in mind You are limiting the Yamaha tops full performance by using the CV tops with them. Using the four 18's with the Yamahas would work better IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members OneEng Posted June 26, 2014 Author Members Share Posted June 26, 2014 Good job on the Matrix and separate filtering on tops! The CV is a 128db box The Yamaha is a 134db box Keep that in mind You are limiting the Yamaha tops full performance by using the CV tops with them. Using the four 18's with the Yamahas would work better IMO. You know what. I bet that my DSR112's would have handled 2 subs under each of them well enough. I didn't even think of that. Thanks for the tip! Next time out I will give that a shot! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.