Last month’s InfoComm Show (see report) was a blast. Actually, anytime I’m surrounded with new technologies, new ideas and new gear is an uplifting experience for me, and this year’s expo did not disappoint. Hey, I’m not so far gone that I start drooling over 8-inch ceiling speakers, but there was a great assortment of cool new offerings for sound reinforcement pros. And at least in the milieu of live audio, gear makes the world go round.
We had some interesting discussions on our ProAudioSpace.com forum recently that touched on similar topics. One revolved around whether, after being “spoiled” on digital consoles, with their attendant abilities of automation, loading/archiving show files and so on — can we ever really go back to the simpler days of analog? And certainly, with shows like multi-act festivals or theatre mixing (particularly musicals), digital is definitely the way to go, especially when doing tight set changes. Yet at the same time — beyond the never-ending analog vs. digital sonic arguments — there’s something very tactile about actually grabbing faders and knobs, rather than stepping through lists of presets, sifting through fader banks or digging through layers to bring up the right plug-in or EQ. The footprint issue itself has much appeal to promoters (especially in theatre), where every extra seat occupied by a FOH rig represents a revenue loss, while no one I know enjoys mixing a 120 input show on a large analog board with two or three sidecars handling the additional mic and line feeds. Clearly there’s room for everyone.
Blast to the Past
Recently, another interesting ProAudioSpace thread involved people talking about their first P.A. systems. No love lost in this regard, as engineers related stories about their early rigs, which ranged from padded tuck-and-roll upholstered Kustom boxes to a respectable percentage that seemed to have some Altec A-7 Voice of the Theatre boxes fed by several interlinked five-input rotary-knob Model 1567a tube mixers at their past gigs. Those might have been the “good old days,” but I’m not sure any FOH mixers want to be cast back into that era of technology, any more than they’d want to trade their modern line array systems for some JBL W-boxes and a pile of Shure VocalMaster columns.
Of course even in the darkest days of our industry’s past, I don’t remember too many audience members walking out of Fillmore shows or early “Day on the Green” stadium festivals complaining about the sound. This could either have been a result of chemical influences (of all sorts) or simply a case of people accepting the standards of the day, just as listeners amazed by early gramophones, radio broadcasts or talking pictures were more mesmerized by the fact it occurred at all, rather than
critiquing the audio performance.
Into the Present and Future
Yet somehow, even with the movement towards MP3s and lo-fi media (and fewer people having decent home playback gear), today’s live performances (and, possibly, movie theatres) are among the few places where the mass public can actually be exposed to quality audio. Live playback systems — featuring better consoles (both analog and digital), more accurate speaker rigs and vastly improved means of dealing with troublesome room acoustics — have opened up amazing possibilities for presenting live performances with superb transient response, dynamic range and wide bandwidth reproduction. And in that respect, we’ve come full circle, where the live performance venue can now represent the state of the art in the listening
experience.
The only variable in the process is you. No longer confined by the limits set by technology, anything is possible. All that’s required is attention to details — whether from the system setup to the selection of the subtlest signal processing nuances in the mix — and literally anything is possible, with nothing to hold you back. And here’s where the human factor comes in — it’s up to you to take what’s happening on stage to the next level and help create that memorable experience for every person in the audience.
Catch George’s commentary at www.fohonline.com/foh-tv
