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A little over a week ago, a massive power surge hit our building and wreaked havok with a lot of gear accross the building.  Thankfully, my main audio system and everything powered by the AV transformer in the Worship Center was fine.  Unfortunately, one of my three projectors was not on the AV power, but tied into the power that the theatrical lighting system uses, which isn’t buffered or protected from power surges.  (a conditioner for 1k+ Amps of 3 phase power isn’t cheap)  Fortunately (depending on how you look at it) we still have the old projectors that we replaced almost two years ago and we were asked to mount one of those in leiu of the broken one until we can get it fixed.  Sounds simple, right?

I’ll call the newer broken projector “Pani” and the old projector “prox” to make this a bit easier.  Now the facts:  Pani weighs maybe 30lbs.  Prox weighs 36kg’s.  For all of you that like standard instead of metric units, 37kg’s is approx 80lbs.  Pani is approximatly 1 foot by 2 feet by 6 inches.  Prox is probably 3 times that size.  They are approximately the same brightness, but have different lenses, which means different throw distances.  Translation: we can’t use Pani’s mount for Prox.  This means bringing in the big boom lift so we can get to the steel I-beams 30 feet in the air above the stage.  One missed measurement meant altering the mounting position 3 feet closer to the screen, which we found out after we got the 80lb beast up there was about 1 foot closer than it needed to be.  After a trip back to the drawing board, several trips to Home Depot, and a little fabrication, ol’ Prox is in position where he needs to be, two full days of work eaten up unexpectedly.

Today Ryan and I take a few hours to look at the gym system that has been performing under par lately.  During our test and tuning, the amplifier for the subs in there let’s out the magic smoke, taking out part of the power conditioner/protector that it was plugged into.  According to the manual for the amp (Peavey CS 4080Hz) there is several layers of circuit protection built in to keep things from roasting, but apparantly the manual didn’t inform the amp that it was supposed to protect itself because there were pieces of what I think was a PTC (positive temperature coefficient thermistor) inside the amp when I opened it up to have a look.  If I’m right about the PTC (I hope there’s more to it than that), then Peavey has lost a few points in my book (not that they had that many to begin with), as I don’t have a clue to as why an amp manufacturer would want the only protection from shorts to be a PTC.  (well, I do have a clue…. they’re cheap)  Why not a good ol’ $0.20 fuse (which is also cheap) that blows up when those things happen, or a tried and true circuit breaker?

Short Rant and disclaimer.  This is strictly my personal opinion, take it for what it’s worth, lol:  I personally have had a (mostly) positive experience with Peavey gear in the past as far as it being operational and producing some sort of sound.  They make a decent product for what they charge for it and for the niche market that keeps them afloat (small churches, DJ’s, weekend sound guys, etc) it probably works great for them.  For me, though, there is a plethora of gear out there on a much higher level than Peavey’s stuff that doesn’t cost that much more that I can depend on, and sounds great.  Btw, the power conditioner that blew up was the second Monster brand power conditioner that’s failed on me less than a year after it was purchased.  I think I’m done with Monster. 

I have a pile of gear that needs repair, including Aviom personal mixers and old Soundweb Green DSP boxes, but no money to fix them.  *sigh*  Without technology, I’d be out of a job, but if all the technology I managed worked properly, I wouldn’t have anything to do!  I would have to start doing creative stuff like deciding which reverb patch I liked more, or whether we should go with “magenta”, ”cocoa”, or “egg blue” gels in our lights! lol

In my last few months in my new job, I find my anal-retentive tendancies will not let me be satisfied with “good enough” and I’m always listening and watching for ways to improve on what we have at CFC.  Approxamately a month ago, our main audio system’s DSP started flaking out and we had to replace them or be left with a sound system that looked good, but didn’t actually put out any sound.

That would be a problem.

As much as I like looking at the huge EAW cabinets, I would rather listen to them and enjoy the sonic properties for which they were purchased.  So we replaced our old BSS Soundweb Original units with the newer BSS Soundweb London units, threw in an EAW UX8800, and started programming.  As the original program had been tweaked a number of times, it was definitely time to take a fresh look at what was done, why it was done, fix a few problems, and iron out the wrinkles.  The result was a much more dynamic system with significantly increased clarity and imaging.  Since I don’t have any system evaluation tools such as EAW’s SMARRT, everything had to be set the old fashioned way: by listening.  After tweaking crossover values, fixing the system delay’s (which cleaned things up tremendously), and playing with parametric EQ’s, we settled on a “good enough for now” setting that has worked up until now.

Thanks to a women’s conference I worked this weekend, I had the time to sit back and evaluate several aspects of our audio/video/lighting systems and came to a few conclusions.  First of all, the lighting on the front of the stage isn’t even, which severely affects one of our camera positions, and two, thanks to Kathy Triccoli, I discovered that the new system is particularly harsh with sibilant’s, mainly the “esse” (“s”) sound.  Kathy is a powerful and dynamic vocalist that when paired with the Shure KSM9 reveals all the flaws within a sound system.  Couple that with the new track I discovered from Meredith Andrews, and I am now determined to identify the offending frequencies in the system and smooth them out.

There will definitely be some more system EQ work, but what I’m delving into now that is new to me is the concept of “de-essing” using the sidechain of a compressor.  If you’re reading this, know what I’m talking about and have any tips, please share, as I’m always in need of good mentors.

For all you other readers that are now completely lost, you can now return to your regularly scheduled programming.