Christmas in July

The PM5D is here!





It arrived yesterday, a day early.
In my earlier posts I've commented on the paperwork and processes that accompany many aspects of being the "House Guy". Picking up new and expensive things from the receiving department is no exception. The equipment must be duly logged-in, forms filled out, items must be entered into the inventory, and bar code decals applied. Then and only then can you get the most expensive single piece of equipment under my purview out of their warehouse and into the Dome.
Of course, as son as we got it in the building I was late for a meeting... How about an hour long meeting when there's a brand new digital mixer in the very next room? No thanks man, I'm alright. There was no getting out of it though. So to the meeting I went. I even paid attention, mostly. :)

After the meeting there was some hunting for the appropriate people and equipment to get the large parcel upstairs and across the carpet to the control room. I also had to get the cases for the PM4000 and it's power supply. The venerable old mixer was unceremoniously unhooked, carted out of the room, and laid into it's case for the last time.

I'm going to miss the old 4K. It's a GREAT desk and I feel privileged to have used it for so long. If you read my previous post, you'll understand that I'm going to have a hard time parting with it.

The new mixer was in the room in about ninety minutes. We spent the hour or so before it was time to go home getting it mostly hooked-up. The power supplies went into the adjoining rack. The MY cards were inserted. The wiring harness that was custom made for the 4K had some slight modifications and was mostly plugged right in.

I had some other work to do today but I did get some time to play with the mixer. The mixer even did it's first show tonight. No, I didn't deploy a brand new mixer on a big show on day one. I had a set & forget gig where the internal client needs a mic and a CD player to come out of some speakers we set-up.
I should have more time tomorrow to check out the desk. I'll post some about the check-out and the install over the next few days.

Out With The Old

One of the responsibilities included in managing all the audio and AV gear for an organization is the power to make decisions about what gear to buy and what gear to get rid of. Now, that’s not to say I could just whip out the Master Card and buy a thirty-box line array without any approval. That would be a very unwise choice indeed.
Let’s say though I identify a need for a couple more powered speakers and stands. I can pretty much decide what to buy and initiate the buying process. Being an entity of the state government, this process can be arduous and time consuming but for the most part we get what we asked for as long as it’s within reason and you’re good enough at justification.
This post isn’t about the shiny new gear though; it’s about the other end of the spectrum.

If you have a facility or sound company for long enough, you will undoubtedly have some stuff on shelves in dark corners of your storage rooms that isn’t getting used and probably isn’t going to get used ever again.
If you picture that Beheringer compressor that has one bad channel, you’re on the right track. Here’s a piece of gear that’s not technically worthless (simmer down you guys, I know you don’t like this brand in the first place). It has a working channel, right? But it’s not worthy of your repair budget dollars because of it’s less than stellar lineage and who’s ever going to rack that piece again knowing that one channel is bad? So it sits on the shelf with board tape saying “Left channel NFG” in sharpie stuck to the face. This unit could stay on my shelf for YEARS. It’s silently hoping for the unlikely event to come along where I need “just one more channel of compression”. It’s never going to happen though because we’ve got a stack of dbx 160s sitting right next to it on the shelf.

Given some time, these items can really pile-up. All it takes is an upgrade project or two and you could have a first class yard sale brewing in your back room. Consider the new mixer I’m about to install. How many delays, compressors, and gates will it replace in our control room? Just about all of them, I guess. No real need for the type of commonplace dynamics we have up there when all their functions are included in the mixer, right? Heck, the mixer out guns them ten times over. I could see keeping some of those pieces if they were really special, but our equipment is pretty run of the mill so off to the storage shelves they will go.

Just like buying stuff, the state has procedures to follow for disposing of its property. These too can be tedious and time consuming. For the last few years we’ve been selling all of our old stuff on a web auction site for government surplus property. On these sites you can find pretty much anything you’re interested in but it’s likely to be broken, missing pieces, quite lightly described, and very poorly photographed.
Recently, after much hand wringing, loads of paperwork and prodding of the bureaucracy, we put lots of stuff online. Even harder than working through the sale process though was the process of deciding to actually let go of some of the good stuff. I’m a packrat at heart so it’s not in my nature to let anything go that I think I might need. I also have trouble selling anything that I think is “good” for much less than what I think is a fair price. We decided to sell some pretty nice White and KT EQs, a perfectly good delay, and some other pieces that I felt I’d like to have for myself. We weren’t using those units though so they had to go.
Those good things went together in a fairly large lot of audio and AV related stuff including 16 amplifiers, an overhead projector and a slide projector. The lot sold for only a few hundred dollars. We could have done better if we’d sold the things individually on an audio related site or even Ebay but this is the process and it’s just the way it’s done. Somebody got a bunch of stuff for not a lot of money.
I hope that those EQs will end up in the hands of somebody who needs them and will use them again. They’re meant to be used. They deserve better then the shelf in my office.

Now that we've had our big yard sale, I guess it's time to start the new pile. I need to spend more time on the internet so I can find some new products that we "just gotta have". There's some extra space i nthe storage room now, ya know?

Travel, Training & New Gear

I’m writing this post from a gate at the airport in Minneapolis. This is a pretty rare occurrence for me. Air travel isn’t in the normal scope of work for a guy whose gig is decidedly stationary and vacations are usually of the “stuff the family and belongings into the car and drive for days” variety.
This isn’t a vacation though so the occasion is even rarer. I’ve been away for a couple days to attend some training on the Yamaha PM5D digital mixing system. Yamaha put on these training events around the country and even in Canada as a customer service/marketing service. Yamaha has a pretty good crew running these shows and they really know their products. The best part of the whole deal is that these trainings are free of charge. No purchase necessary!
I was able to attend one in Atlanta a year or so back that was focused on their then-relatively new M7CL console. This was my first real experience with a digital console of any sort and I really liked the flexibility offered by the latest crop. The very idea of storing and recalling all the parameters of something as complex as a multi-channel mixer is a thing of beauty. Add to that the compressors, gates, effects, and patching are all right there in a box I could pick up and carry to the car and you can make a sound guy pretty happy indeed.
Of course, there are trade-offs. All your eggs are there in one basket. There’s that touch screen to contend with. There’s also a pretty scary paradigm shift. You have to change your thinking. You have to look at the pages and menus on the screen to see how things are set. What’s the threshold on that compressor? I duno, let me find it on the screen.
As with everything else though, digital is the future.
The M7 is a great piece of kit for the market it’s aimed at. Churches and sound companies have been snatching them up at a pretty good clip since they were introduced. We even thought it would probably work well as a replacement for the PM4000 in the Dome’s control room. We liked the fact that the all the faders were available on the surface and it seemed to have enough inputs and outputs to contend with our usual requirements.
As it turned out, there was more money available for the mixer upgrade than we had been planning on so I set out on a search for the “right” digital mixer for our needs. Our set-up isn’t really what the system designers are thinking about when they’re chalking up the next big thing. We’re not really like a theater, rock show, corporate stage show, theme park, or even a television production. We’re a little of all those things, of course, but if you were going to design the perfect console for any of them, it would have bits that we don’t need and maybe it’d be missing stuff we would really like. We use a lot of outputs, for instance, but I’ve got no time for your fancy reverbs. Before we bought the 01v last year, we didn’t even have any “wet” effects at all and to be honest, I haven’t even tried the ones in that box.
I spent a lot of time online looking at several different mixing platforms from the likes of Digidesign, Allen & Heath, Soundcraft, and a few others. I reached out to friends and colleagues who were likely more wise than I am. We even went to see a couple different mixers at local churches. In the end I ended-up where I thought I’d be from the beginning. We put out an RFQ for a PM5D last week. If all goes well it will be installed by mid July and we’ll be rocking the Dome with a digital desk this season.
I knew from the get-go that the 5D had specs enough to satisfy our requirements. The thing is, it’s been out for almost five years. In today’s digital world, a five year old piece of electronics has certainly been superseded, if not rendered totally obsolete. For some markets, the same could be said for the 5D. In the five or six years since it’s design several others have had their shot at making something better. The competition has done a good job too as many of the newer consoles are gaining market share to be sure. The 5D has been the benchmark during this time and it has weathered the storm of competition very well. With the recent major software revision, Yamaha has included many new features and changed the way some other things work. It seems that they’ve been listening to the thousands of customers that have been attending these training seminars around the country year after year.
One of the things I learned from having one of their products for several years and from the M7 class I took is that Yamaha has a well thought out customer service department. I haven’t had to take advantage of their 24/7 emergency number, but it’s good to know it’s there. And one of their two national service centers is at CTG, right there in Atlanta. I know those things can change, but it’s another piece of mind when your making a big purchase like this.
This week’s training sessions were as good as the one I attended last year. Jose and Shawn are very informed about their products and they never hesitate to delve deep into any questions you might have during their presentations. Jose stopped his talk several times to attempt to recreate the hypothetical situations we came up with and see what the mixer would do. He’s still curious when he doesn’t know the answer to a question and he wants to figure it out as much as we do.
The first day was mostly stuff that I figured out by watching the videos that are available online and during a couple days of playing with a rental mixer that was loaned to me a few weeks ago (thanks HiTech!). Of course there were a few tips and deeper-level things that I hadn’t picked up before so it was worth it.
Today’s session consisted of file management and expanded-system configurations. The file management stuff was VERY helpful since it’s something that I have not had to deal with before. It’s pretty darned complicated too. I think I have a pretty good understanding now and I’m pretty sure that I would not have gotten this far without some human instruction. There is only so much one can discern from a PDF file on the internet.
I’ll post more about this project as it goes along. There are a few different phases of the installation and I’m sure there will be some interesting stories that come from us climbing the learning curve.

Just to put your mind at ease, I did make it home safe and sound. The weather had us hanging around at the gate for a while and we were late getting home, but I made it to work on time the next day. :)

Intermittent Failure

First, a definition from Dictionary.com

intermittent
Pronunciation[in-ter-mit-nt]
–adjective
1. stopping or ceasing for a time; alternately ceasing and beginning again: an intermittent pain.
2. alternately functioning and not functioning or alternately functioning properly and improperly.

You all know something about this. It's the way in which a piece of equipment will work fine, do something unexpected, and then work fine again without anybody fixing it. This is more common with things that are electronic or mechanical in nature. This leads me to believe that intermittency is not natural.

I believe it's evil, actually.

You see, in my world something that's unreliable is the worst sort of problem. We do live shows. There generally aren't any second takes. When you hand the girl the microphone and she starts to sing the National Anthem, the sound needs to come out of the speakers. Now. "It worked fine an hour ago" isn't much consolation when your boss or worse yet the Client is looking at you like the world just fell down on him and it's your fault. Ever been boo-ed by twenty thousand people- on your birthday? I have. There were no T-shirts.

It is hard to explain to somebody who isn't in the event business why a problem that "fixes itself" is so troubling.
Consider this example: During one of the recent graduations, I was playing the National Anthem from the Instant Replay (hard disc recorder). Everything was going just fine when there's a loud POP from the PA and the house system is just gone. There's some question about it now, but I think the stage speakers were still working.
Now, we've got thousands of people in the stands and every one of them is very interested in seeing their family member graduate TODAY. Not to mention the five other events in the next three days that need sound. If the PA is dead... Well, nothing good can come from that.
The song ends (about twenty seconds, but it was a LONG time to me) and we're supposed to roll right into another song with no interlude so I push the faders down fade the IR back up and hit the hot key for the next track. I'm VERY curious, my mind is racing through all the things to check and forming non-existent contingency plans, and the adrenalin is pumping pretty hard. Thankfully the song falls out of the speakers and the show goes on without any further trouble.

Whatever it was, we didn't fix it. It "Fixed Itself".

I've racked my brain trying to figure out what could have caused that temporary outage. Lots of possibilities, to be sure. No real good candidates have come forward though.

What I do know is:

Unless you positively identify the failure point and eliminate it, you are liable to have the problem again.

And

When it does fail again, it will not be at an opportune time for you.

I've spent the better part of a decade finding vulnerabilities in the equipment and practices that we use to put on events in this building. I know that we're much better off than we were years ago. We have more spare parts, better system designs, better equipment, and most of all, more years of experience. I remember the time we got our ass kicked because we hadn't learned "the lesson we learned on that show that time where that stuff didn't work".

And yet, we are still dealing with electronics and physics. We're vulnerable all the time to LOTS of things that could stop the show. And lets remember that without the PA system, you can't put seventy thousand people into this place. It's not safe.

Am I thankful that the system "fixed itself"? Hell yeah!

Do I believe it's "fixed"? Not on your life! I'm waiting for it to happen again. Maybe then we'll scrape together enough data to figure out what happened.

And so I've come to believe:

"Intermittent Failure is the hand of the Devil."

Let the Commencements End

As it turns out, there are a lot of high schools in the Atlanta area. This is the week that thousands of young men and women are thrust upon the "adult" world in a ceremony known both as commencement and graduation.
We've been doing one high school's graduation for several years now. They were joined by Georgia Tech a few years ago and Georgia State last year. Apparently this year somebody distributed a memo because we're doing no less than EIGHT of these events...More are promised next year.
The high school shows are pretty shoestring events. No line-arrays and delay stacks hanging from the sky here.
There are three to six hundred graduates sitting in chairs on the field with the stage on the field at the 35 yard line. The parents and families sit in the regular end zone seating and are covered by the normal house PA system. We're using speakers on stands to cover the students, any band or performance space adjacent to the stage, and the stage itself. A couple mics are placed on the stage, two for the band, and three or four for the choir, if needed. A 12 or 14 channel snake runs back to the FOH space near the center of the end zone wall.
At FOH I have a CD player and/or Instant Replay, a channel or two of outboard EQ, VOG mic, and the Yamaha 01V96 mixer that we got last year.
I think I'll do a separate post detailing what it's been like for me to adjust from the analog to the digital mixer world but I will say that it's *NICE* to have decent EQ and compression on every channel.
The graduations are all pretty similar but there are variations between the schools. One has a dance ensemble, another has a big choir, while a third had no performers at all, using a CD to play the anthem and pomp.
There's usually no "tech" rehearsal so there are the inevitable surprises: "Oh crap! There's a singer on stage for the Alma Mater." "Woah, the band is playing...no mention of THIS in the program." An MC-like kick-off announcer before the procession? How about the soloist who leaps on stage while the whole class was singing a tribute song and looked for all the world like a hooligan? I kept the mic off but the band director later told me that was part of the show... Who knew?
Fortunately I kept on my toes for the most part and didn't really miss anything.

It was a really good run of shows, actually. I still have trouble getting a loud enough stage volume for the on-stage dignitaries to hear well and still having enough gain before feedback to handle the "quiet talkers" and the ones who don't talk towards the mic. There's always more to learn. But all-in all, I think everybody heard most everything.
It was a good feeling when it was over. That sure was a lot of names...

CW

The Upper Level

There's a shot I originally published on the Pentax User's Gallery. I have a few Pentax cameras now and mainly shoot with my K10D digital SLR.
I think it's interesting today because these seats were teal then (about 2001) but they've been replaced this summer with red and black ones. I wonder if I took the picture again with the same film (c41 b&w) how different the image would look.

Coach Com Stories

Reading a post online this morning, I'm reminded of a story from a high school football tournament a couple years ago.

We put the coaches way up in the rafters where they can see the teams formations and whatnot. To communicate to the coaches on the field we have a Telex intercom system. As things progress, even high school coaches have outgrown our simple two channel system. Teams nowadays usually bring their own wireless intercom set-up. Some will use our wired stuff as a back-up or they might augment their system by using ours for their "lessor" coaches. They have several coaches now that all would love to have their own channels.
The tournaments we do are typically four games per day. I really don't know what they do at their home fields but they can be really rough on our gear. It's very common for them to call during a game and need a cable replacement. They're dragging these things up and down the sideline with fifty or sixty kids in cleats doing their best to stand on the cables so that's to be expected. We don't really mind the death of a cable or two. We're making enough to cover that.
Interestingly enough, they're usually pretty irate when the system that they've torn-up doesn't work anymore. It doesn't matter if they're currently winning or losing either. They're just pissed that they can't communicate with the boys upstairs.

There are a few memorable instances:

1. The coach-assistant kid hands me belt pack & headset and says "It quit working". "Where's the cable?" I ask. "It fell out" That's when I notice that the connector is still attached to the belt pack.
Now, I've never had an XLR cable just "fall out" of the connector before but hey, one never knows, right? Riiight, uhhuh. Quizzical look, replace cable, go on about my day.

2. Called to the sideline, I'm confronted by a coach who's livid because he can't talk to his guys anymore like he could in the first quarter. He's on a cell phone with them now.
So, we know it *was* working. I can hear myself in the headset so I know that this end is working. I can also hear that the key upstairs is open and some body's talking in the background. Coaches kid says their guys upstairs both have the headsets on but can't talk to anyone at all. I get one of my guys to go upstairs so we can figure this out. The other team is using their own wireless rig. We quickly learn that something is terribly wrong here.
You see, this being a wired system, it sort-of matters which booth you are in. The booth on the left is wired to the "home" side. The other booth is wired to the "visitor" side. There is no way to talk to the visitor side from the home booth. Probably a good thing, that.
The fix is easy. When the coaches come back after half-time, they switch booths and low, the headsets work now! I'm still wondering who they were talking to in the first quarter :)

3. As I approach the coach, I notice that he's no longer wearing the headset. Unfortunately, he's still wearing the belt pack and it's still attached to the headset which is presently dragging behind the coach on the ground(!). The coach is pretty involved in the game, but I manage to get his attention by tugging gently on the now-destroyed headset (remember the sixty young men with cleats?)
"That damn thing doesn't work!" spits towards me. I'm kinda angry but I manage to ask what happened. No usable information comes from the coach so I politely inform him that I'll be a few minutes fetching another headset and cable. I also let him know that he'll be charged for the replacement of the gear he's ruined. He literally throws the junked headset and belt pack at me. "We aint payin, tha fuckin thing didn't work anyway!" he yells.
Its a funny thing, but that replacement headset we have on hand wasn't where we usually keep it. We're not sure how it got misplaced... Too bad about the loss, coach.


(no football teams were actually harmed in the making of this post, honest)