On Thursday 02 May 2013 22:37:53 Thomas Vecchione did opine:
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Fons Adriaensen
<fons(a)linuxaudio.org>
wrote:
I guess that
everyone who has worked for some time in broadcasting,
film, theater or similar environments has at least one horror story
to tell...
Heh one of my favorites involved the lead up before a band ever took
stage, when their tour manager (Also their A2) started talking to me
about their setup....
By the end of the conversations the stage crew offered to have him
'dissappear' the moment he stepped off the bus for me. It was very
tempting.
Then one of my more recent gigs, a small gig that was supposed to be a
couple of zones of speakers on sticks and me mixing a small 5 person
cast for about 15 minutes outside in the city. High-er levels, as I
knew the producer and knew what he would want, but nothing to terrible
and sounds pretty average, till I show up and am told that I can't use
any speaker stands, not because they are worried about them falling on
people but because the venue didn't want them falling on the _boxwood_
_hedges_. Frustrated doesn't begin to describe me at that point.
Suddenly the gig became theater in the round, with the mains pointed
into the round with the performers(As they were blocked to move amongst
the audience all night), and resting on the ground. Feedback was a
slight issue to put it mildly.
And of course you have the venue I went to when working a tour across
the country over here, that I walked in and the 'sound engineer' for
the venue hands me AC ground lifts and tells me to lift the ground on
all my equipment or I can't tie into their system. He says it is the
only way to avoid buz and that he won't risk his system for my sound.
I calmly try to explain that what he was describing was a ground loop
and is easily fixed by other methods that don't involve endangering the
lives of people near my equipment, but he refuses to hear me and
insists they have tried everything possible and this is the only thing
that worked. Needless to say I conveniently 'forgot' to life the AC
grounds on my equipment and instead properly isolated the audio grounds
fixing the problem. He comes up to me after the gig and complains that
I didn't use it, my response... "Did you hear a buzz?" I then stepped
outside after load-out and called the production company to tell them
enver to book that venue again, this was only one of the problems I had
with it(Enough slack in the fly system to wrap a dead body in comes to
mind as well).
Yep, this list goes on for quite a while. ;)
Seablade
PS For those unaware, NEVER lift an AC ground on a piece of equipment.
If my system is properly wired, and over the last 60 years there have been
some that were wired by idiots, but where I either did it, or saw to it
that it was done right, anybody using a ground lifter gets invited off the
stage. But you'd be totally blown away by the condition of some of the
equipment, one bass players amp was so bad that it set my pocket field
sniffer off from 6" away. Walking over to the axe itself I got the same
bleeep out of it. Told him to fix it, he didn't know how, but I had 15
minutes to spare & cobbled up an xlr to tip-ring-shell cable & plugged his
axe direct to a mic channel on our board. He squawked he couldn't hear & I
said thats how it is, I'm not gonna let your pissy amp kill somebody on my
stage. The mixer on duty that day was fairly good after I explained how to
do it for the axe & it didn't sound that bad once he'd put his fingers in
cruise control.
Cheers, Gene
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