Audio

The National Association of Broadcasters has contacted me to giving the readers of this blog a deal on registration for the NAB show, free admission. Which is 0. Wow.

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Two weeks ago I got fed up with the lack of high quality sound from our pastor’s mic (going on for a long time now) and decided to do a few experiments. For starters, we have a Countryman E6i – which I hate. When Countryman marketed the microphone as flexible, what they really meant to say was breakable.

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I know for sound guys in church the volume issue and complaints is a bit of an open wound. I have tasted more than my fair share of church politics on this issue. There are some things you need to think about:

1. Style IS an issue, swollen-ankle old lady organ music doesn’t sound good at 107dB. Rock music doesn’t work at 88dB either. I went and saw Avatar in IMAX 3D, and the volume had to be triple digit sound levels on C-weighting, and yet everyone was captivated by the story and the experience.

2. Consider A-weighting vs. C-weighting. If you run low-frequency heavy mixes, C weighting will probably not be as accurate as a heavy kick drum or bass note will cause the needle to gyrate even on the slow setting. And usually flipping between A and C there is a difference in how loud it measures by anywhere from 3dB to 10dB depending on the mix.

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Doing monitors the past few weeks I thought I’d share how I mix monitors.

1. Don’t Sit at the Monitor Board and wait for the musicians to shout what they need to you. In fact, I spend very little time at the monitor position unless I’m fixing levels, EQ, or listening to the drummers in-ear mix to adjust levels. I spend almost all night of rehearsal on stage standing next to or behind the musicians so I can hear what they are hearing from their monitors.

2. Be Proactive Rather than Reactive. This is the most important thing to me. What I’ll do is spend about 60-90 seconds standing right next to or behind a musician or vocalist just listening to their wedge mix, and also the ambient noise around them they would use as reference. After those 90 seconds I’ll say “how you doing? you need anything?” at which point they’ll say, “I’m good, thanks” and I’ll move to the next musician, or they’ll say “I could use a little… “, and I’ll go work on it for them, then come back listen and repeat the process until they are content. More and more, I’m getting into a habit of hearing that a musician has a ton of snare or electric guitar and not much else and I will recommend that I adjust their mix.

Many times musicians can’t quite put into words what they need or have too much of and we can help out. Some musicians don’t want to be seen as being needy and constantly asking for changes in their mix, in spite of being unhappy with what their hearing. If you ask them rather than waiting for them telling you, it disarms that needy, self-consciousness that many musicians try and avoid. I’ll do this process about 2-3 times during the night because different songs with different instruments starting and vocalists leading it means you have to build them a mix that works for 5 different songs.

3. Listen to What the Musicians Are listening To. Believe it or not, soloing the monitor mix on headphones sounds way different than what the wedge sounds like in front of the musician. Last week we had a different bass player and the electric guitarist needed some bass so I went and stood next to the guitar player and realized that he had bass – sort of. I went back and added a bit of 200Hz to the bass EQ and the guitar player thought I had brought the volume way up. Which brings me to…

4. Small Changes Make a Big Difference. We have Ashly Protea monitor controllers, with the Remote Control (pictured here). It’s a digital HPF, LPF, compressor/limiter, 31 band EQ all in one. And it’s smoking awesome. I’ve set it to EQ the monitors to a flat frequency response and compress only about 2-4dB to glue their mix together, but when we had a big vocal group I had a hard time getting a good tonal balance from the eight singers, EQ’ing their channels didn’t really help get a good tonal balance. After listening to their monitor I tried boosting every frequency 1dB between 100Hz and 1000Hz on their monitor EQ through the Ashly and it made a huge difference. Lifting those midrange frequencies by only 1dB had a multiplying effect, and they could hear themselves and their pitch much better.

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I was running audio for the youth tonight and I ran out of mic stands but needed to mic up the guitar cab. What to do? Suspend the mic against the speaker cloth using it’s own XLR cable with a knot to hold it up. The microphone stayed put all night with guitar players jumping around like the stage was a giant trampoline.

What is your opinion, is this microphone stand fail or creative win? Leave a comment.

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If you’re like me when you read head to head tests, you’ll almost certainly scroll to the end to see which has won, and then perhaps scroll back to find out why. Unless you disagree with the verdict, or you already own the loser in which case you’ll go back to FaceTube. That’s what I do.

So I’ll tell you (unless you’ve already scrolled to the bottom to see in which case you’re not reading this) that the Sennheiser won. I didn’t come to the decision lightly. The Audio Technica stood toe to toe in almost every area of the testing process before the shootout. It has the best price point, similar features and performs almost identical to the Sennheiser. For the shootout I gave the IEMs to our drummer who usually has (mono) in-ears. He was totally loving the stereo. About every 15 minutes or during a pause where I had a moment to talk the drummer I would have him switch IEM packs. I merely wired the IEMs so that the Sennheiser and the Audio Technica’s were receiving the same mix, making the only difference the performance of the equipment. And the drummer told me he could hear a difference between the two. He spotted the low end boost on the Sennheisers, and went on to say that the Sennheisers have “a better attack and clarity.”

I know some have said that some In Ears seem to squash the transient response of the audio coming in, and under performance conditions he spotted a bit more clarity than the Audio Technicas. He did like the aux input on the side of the Audio Technica’s so that you could theoretically insert a click track or ambient mic. When I asked him about whether buying the Audio Technica’s over the Sennheisers would be much of an issue, he didn’t seem to think it was that big of a deal. I think he knows the budget is going to be the final determining factor of which we could afford.

The amount of momentum towards this is awesome. The worship pastor and I have talked to almost every musician and vocalist in person and everyone but one person is on board with this. Two of our female vocalists said they’d be willing to personally pitch in to help us purchase our IEMs and one of our acoustic players who was playing went so far as to say he’d be willing to donate one of the IEM systems. WOW! I feel like I’m spoiled with people who get it, people who are selfless enough to see that while this will benefit them, it’s not about them. That what all of this is about is to help lower stage volume so that people in the house can have a clearer mix to worship in and to better hear about Jesus.

All those phone conversations I’ve had, the countless email threads with guys who have done this before are starting to pay off. But it’s not over. This is just the beginning. Planning is one thing execution is another matter. On Tuesday I’ll be attending a live webinar put on by Mike, Jason & Dave over Livestream on IEMs, I’ll be asking questions about the two things I’m still not getting solid info about.

1. How do you deal with musicians who poo-poo the process and use of IEMs? Can you force people to go IEM if they want to play?

2. Audience / ambience mics: what is their primary purpose? Are they necessary?

I’ll be doing a few posts on IEMs between now and July or August when the system should be up and running and everyone has made the jump to IEMs. For IEMs on the cheap I’d have to say the Audio Technica’s are almost as good as what many consider the industry standard in IEMs. But I’d recommend the Sennheiser, if you’re reading this back to front.

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As I write, I have “Thriller” juicing my ears along with my test CD that has everything from electric music, The Who, to Beethoven. First off a little housekeeping. I am doing a head to head shootout of the Sennheiser G2 IEMs against the Audio Technica M3’s. I need to say that the reason I chose not to demo the Shure PSM’s is, umm… price. The PSM 600s and 700s are out of our price range.

Now do the the Sennheiser review. The tech specs say that the G2 has a frequency response of 40Hz – 15kHz which, on paper, should be better than the Audio Technica, but it isn’t. I keep switching my Sony MDR-7506 headphones between the M3 receiver and the G2 reciever and the only noticeable difference is a wide +3dB boost around 160Hz to create some artificial warmth in the Sennheiser. And if the musicians want a bit more warmth, they can ask the sound guy to change the EQ.

Listening to classical music (the ultimate test of clarity in my opinion), the faux warmth doesn’t really help. Although I have a few pieces of music that have heavy timpani and double-bass that really rumble in the 30Hz real estate, and the Senn’s sounded a little cleaner on those frequencies. The high frequencies sound exactly the same, good up to about 14kHz and then it drops off. I’ve done the same frequency response test with a measurement mic as I did in my previous post. I also repeated the distance test and the signal started breaking up at the same point the Audio Technica did.

The stereo image? In the last post I mentioned that the stereo image of the AT IEMs sounded about 10% narrower than how I know the music should be. The Sennheiser’s have the same 10% narrowing effect that the AT’s do. And from the picture on the left, it’s evident that while the Audio Technica is larger, it’s not by much. It has almost the same width, thickness, but at less than an inch shorter I say make the musicians deal with it.

At this point, I’m struggling. In the same way that not knowing what TV, stereo, or DVD player to buy everyone usually turns to Sony. I know I should innately go with the Sennheiser, but then I think about the Audio Technica. Its newer, a bit cheaper, no longer discontinued, and while it has no antenna combining facility built-in, that’s not an issue for our application, and I don’t find it being inferior to the Sennheiser in any way. It’s not that I don’t like the Sennheiser, it’s that, given the price point, and equal features, I have no reason not to choose the M3. I’ll do another blog post tomorrow or Saturday about the actual shootout test during rehearsal. Stay tuned

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Well the IEM shootout begins this Thursday, but that didn’t stop me from doing some tests and a good review of the Audio Technica M3 that arrived early. Oh and just to mention, Tuesday Feb. 23rd is a In Ear Monitor online Webinar. The details are here, I’ll be there to grab some good info and hopefully have a few nagging questions answered. Thanks for the update Mike.

“When I did a distance test to find out how far it can transmit, I recorded a very accurate, scientific and repeatable 64 paces. Which is about 130 feet–ish.”

The reason I did an early listening test was something I found in the tech specs. If you go online and look, it says that the frequency response is 60Hz – 13kHz ±3dB. So I wondered how relevant the LF’s and HF’s are on stage? With musicians? Who are slightly deaf? And smell funny? And use too much hair product?

Well, I’ve been following Dave Rat’s Mighty Headphone Quest, and in his tests he puts a measurment microphone under the headphones in his ear much like the photo above and captures the frequency response and then photographs it.

Unlike his test I forgot to use pink noise, and my test music CD has a gopping-wide scratch on it, so I used Love is Here(tenth avenue north). The frequency response from the DOD Real Time Analyzer shows that there is some good stuff even down at 40Hz. There’s no capture mode on my analyzer so I just had to snap the photo while the music was playing. I saw 32Hz jump occasionally, however I do have to admit there isn’t a lot of high frequencies past about 14kHz which does meet with the Audio Technica specs. But then I got to thinking, few In Ears have good flat frequency response above 14kHz, many (including my Etymotic ER-6’s) drop off after about 10kHz, and I was wearing Sony MDR-7506’s to check the overall mix, and then my Bose Triport’s to check the low frequency response (because the Bose have better LF extension than my Sony’s).

The set-up was actually very easy. I made a point not to look in the manual until I wanted to change the transmitter power output (switchable between 10mW and 50 mW. There was no digging in endless sub menus, and when I did a distance test to find out how far it can transmit on the 50mW output I recorded a very accurate, scientific and repeatable 64 paces. Which is about 130 feet-ish.

There were a few things I really did notice however. First I solo’d the CD from the console on the headphones and switched between the console AFL and the IEM and aside from the frequency response difference, the stereo image is about 10% narrower.

Also there’s the issue of the size of the body pack. I’ve included a picture to capture the enormity of it next to my Radio Shack-o-Meter. And that flexible antenna isn’t really that flexible, it feels much like a thin popsicle stick that you could easily snap in half. The annoying bit is that the battery tray is USELESS! The batteries are not the easiest to change. You have to either use a pen cap, which is what I did. Or you have to risk smashing it into one-thousand and forty twelve-pieces by knocking the batteries out. Which did cross my mind.

This Thursday at 6:30 is the IEM shootout (if you want to come and hang out, feel free to join, here are the directions). I’m going to try and rig some sort of switcher so that I can switch which unit the stereo mix output feeds simlutaneously between the Sennheiser G2 and the AT M3, and plug a headphone combiner into both bodypacks to find out which sounds better so we can here if there’s any differences between the mixes. Again, comments and questions are welcome.

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Today I’m going to talk not about church audio-geekery but why we do what we do and how to get to thinking about why to do what we do.

I don’t presume to know the situation at your church but at mine the worship pastor doesn’t necessarily view me and the audio guys as an ancillary ministry. We collaborate a lot together, he shapes my thinking on worship and allows me to shape his thinking on tech. Before he was hired as the worship pastor the culture meant that guy was one of they, and because they make the big strategic decisions they don’t have to tell us what’s going on or why they are doing what it is that is going on in leadership. So it was they and us.

To be honest I don’t mind being outside they, but we have to know why they are doing what they’re going, because how else are we going to reach them? How are we going to provide a place for those people who don’t even know that Jesus died for them if we don’t know why we do what we do and how do all of us fit into that vision? Even Chris Tomlin poorly paired up with audio guys will sound like just another middle-aged worship leader with the middle name of Duane.

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I saw this youTUBE video on Dave’s website Going to 11. It reminded me of a time that I had an argument with a guitar player about how he could tell every time even if blindfolded, whether a guitar amp was tube or transistor. And after telling him that I couldn’t tell the difference between most tube and transistor products he exclaimed that I shouldn’t work in a recording studio. Give it a watch. It’s very educating and I’ll put it in my favorite videos tab on the right hand tool bar.

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