Posted by Scott Dorsey on 09/14/06 13:10

Roy W. Rising <rwrising@dslextreme.com> wrote:
>>
>> On tonight's "Dancing with the Stars," the sound was ringing a bit
>> throughout the show. Everything was affected. Any guesses..?
>
>My first thought is that the Production Mixer/'Engineer' didn't have a way
>to tell the PA and/or Foldback mixer(s) to "back off". I always use a
>"silent signal" (flashing light) in view of the "House" operators to send
>the message.
>
>Beyond that, there's a chance the Production Mixer's monitors (or
>monitoring practice - TOO LOUD) masked the problem.

On a lot of these gigs, you have production sound guys in the booth,
a reinforcement guy at FOB, and a monitor mixer backstage. These guys
NEED to be coordinating with one another, if possible all on the same
clearcom channel. Sometimes... well... sometimes they are not. Sometimes
somebody isn't paying attention to the clearcom.

Sometimes things start ringing and the monitor and house guys start arguing
about where the ringing is coming from.

>Sometimes there's a "Production" Jerk in the house who demands louder
>levels without regard to the on-air consequences.

This is very, very common. I am very sorry to say how common this is.

>One way to squelch "ringing" is to frequency-shift the PA by a few Hertz.
>I use an old Surrey Frequency Shifter for this. Any modern "harmonizer"
>will do the trick. Beware ... some (not many) performers (and at least one
>Producer I know) have sufficient pitch sensitivity to notice and object.

This will totally screw up performers, though, since they are hearing
the house sound with shifted pitch as well as their monitors.

If this sort of thing is going on and the production mixer has a reasonable
setup, he may be able to patch in some notch filters and kill the worst
of the ringing on the air feed. I've seen a lot of booths without any easy
way to swap in equalization on the fly, though.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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