promoting my lighting and sound company

[oliverst14@hotmail.com]

looks like u have a pretty mean sound system my friend. very very nice. id love to have the sound system u have, a lovely line array mmmmm.

anyway yes iv spent alot on lighting and i absolutly love it. if i could one day be doing large scale lighting setups it would be my dream job i absolutly love it. if we got together (u with ur sound system and me with the lighting) we could do some pretty mean shows i reckon. hehe

thanks alot by the way means alot for u to notice mate.

ollie

edit: i would say scrap a board and use a laptop interface. i use the enttec dongle with freestyler and love it. problem with freestyler is that all scenes need to be programmed before hand and cant easily be manipulated. magic q is another program but is extremly hard to use. im still trying to learn it and have been for a year now. i will say though its an extremly powerful lighting program. its probably similar to live-pro in as how good it is. it can do just about anything but needs along time to practice on.

i also have a coef mastershow lighting desk which is an extremly good lighting desk but again aint had time to learn everything on it so until i do im sticking to what i know and using freestyler. very easy to use and shows still looks extremly good if programmed very well before hand

[norty303]

If you've had magicq for a year and still find it extremely complex then I'd say you haven't actually spent any time using it . Seriously lock yourself away for a weekend with it, read the manual before you start and after and I guarantee you'll be using the main features just fine. Chamsys run free (or very cheap) training courses. Email Clare and get on one. Dunno where in the country you are but I'd be happy to give a few hours if nearby

a touch screen or 2 makes it much better and a wing even more so. If you want to do it seriously you WILL need a desk and magicq with a wing is still about the cheapest fully featured option. Hitting 2 flash buttons simultaneously is not an option in software....

[norty303]

Oh, I just got a look at the pics, are the TrackSpots yours? If so you have some mighty fine scans there. I'd go so far as to say you may have had overkill of lighting in thats space.

On the Freestyler front, you can busk using the submasters if you set up the channels right, movements on one, gobos on another, dimmer chases on another, etc, and then cycle thru them using the keyboard to bump the next one, or the mouse to click the next one. Gives quite good results. But I'd say you are doing a disservice to those lights not having a proper board of some sort.

Whats the facination with line arrays? For the sort of gigs you are going, they are a waste of toime, not long enough to function as a line source and a pain in the ass to fly to get the neccessary coverage. They function ok as a wide dispersion point source but thats not always desirable in a room with close sidewalls.

One issue that you have to bear in mind when mixing lots of different amp and speaker combos is cancellation. That is, at various frequencies through the usable range; one set of cabs will cancel out another set due to phasing charactistics, so you will end up with holes in the frequency response.

The issue with mixing and matching cabs only really presents itself if mixing them within the same frequency band. Properly crossed over and delayed cabs of different types when operating in different ranges will work just fine. When using multiple cabs in any frequency band it is very important to try and use the same amps to drive the whole lot. This ensures that they couple properly. even amps from different manufacturers that supposedly put out the same power don't work nearly as effectively. We tried a PLX3402 and a PLX3002 on some kick bins and the difference when we put 2 x PLX3402 on them was very noticeable.

You can get phase cancellation on any system, room placement makes the biggest difference here. It's used intentionally a lot these days in cardiod sub arrays for big fests to put the sound in the right area of the audience whilst creating nulls elsewhere. Don't forget that frequency is a function of wavelength, so changing distances between cabs can have a profound effect on where nulls and peaks occur in the range

[oliverst14@hotmail.com]

indeed the trackspots are mine but unfortunatly we couldnt use them. i had to move them due to the drum kit being placed on the stage and never found a suitable space for them. i do infact have 6 of them and when i bought them didnt know what i was getting. a small club near me had gone into liquidation and we were buying some of the stuff from the club. we struck a deal for most of the sound equipment above including all amps and the jbls the 2 stobes u see in the pictures and alot of led lighting equipment and some very rubbish stepper motor lasers. we got the lot for £1100 due to the stupidity of the lad selling it. basically he didnt have a clue how much it was worth. not only that though but we tried to haggle him down further and he wasnt having it so i said we will give £1100 if he throws in the 6 scanners.
he and i didnt know how much they were worth so he snatched my hand off, when i got home i went onto solaris network looking at some martin mac 575s that i clearly couldnt afford but i just love looking and saw trackspots seling on there for more than id paid for all of the equipment we had got. it was then i did some research and found how good these really were
i was shocked and so happy i had got them.

problem is the people who owned this club were a bit rough when taking them out of the premesis and some of them have very dodgy dmx connectors which im in the process of changing
They are very nice scanners and these particular scanners are older than me and still going strong, hehe

first mate its not an obbsesion with line array but i just think they are far more professional than a standard speaker setup but i do understand what u mean when it comes to the throw of sound cause i wouldnt require one until doing much larger venues.

just to go back to your pervious post u got me, i havent spent a whole lot of time using magic q, i struggled with it at first and tbh got a little bored of getting it wrong. i would love some help cause it looks an amazing software, hardware package.

i do infact have a proper board and as far as i understand it a pretty good one but again havent found the time to use it and read the really badly translated manuel lol.
i tried my best to get the track spots to work on the board but couldnt figure it out and time got the better of me so we had to scrap that.


just one thing and maybe you can elaborate but im not really sure what u mean when u say u have too much light source coming from the stage area. now considering i wasnt using the trackspots im guessing u would say this was resolved but im just wondering had i used the trackspots why would this be overkill? as you know yourself every fixture can be dimmed and or blacked out at any time and nice chases with more scanner (not all on at the same time) in my opinion look better.
also when i see different areas from which the lights are coming from in a show i think this looks amazing for example a sweep down from a row of scanner then a sweep up from another row of scanners in a different position to me is a very satisfying effect.

i believe that alot of it is in the programing and running of the setup more than the amount of fixtures but more fixtures allow for a more elaborate and impressive control of the show being able to do chases and waves and so on.

the basic point of what im saying in all this bit is that not all lights have to be on at once. maybe iv mis understood what u mean so if u could justy elaborate on why u think too much was used. cheers

thankyou for all your advice with things mate and any further advice is much appreciated

[norty303]

I was purely going on the basis of how muich kit I could see on that stage, but as you say the trackspots didn't get used so it's irrelevant - it wasn't a coment on the pics or what I could see. You're absolutely correct in that having lots of stuff, but only using it sparingly is the key to a good show.

Re: the line array, they have quite specific uses, and are not 'good for everything' in the same way as point source boxes are not good for everything. Right tool for the job springs to mind. It's just that I don't see how 'professional looking' comes into it, when you're dealing with sound. You can get equally attractive point source setups (Funktion 1, Turbosound Aspect, Void Stasys, etc) that would be much better for the majority of small to medium gigs. Throw is a bit of a misnomer in sound, as it's really just down to spl at the source that dictates throw, and line arrays generally still funktion as point sources in small to medium hangs over a good portion of their frequency range.

For a small 'array' type speaker that works well in small numbers and has enough power to surprise you have a look at the Arcline stuff from Void - I have it on good authority that it sounds as good as it looks - the ground flying pole is a nice touch too

http://www.voidaudio.com/product_detail.asp?id=74

[oliverst14@hotmail.com]

nice looking stuff there my friend. i just love how a line array looks tbh. nothing to do with sound.

im not really one for caring about the sound side of things i always want things to look good now i know i should care but i dont really wanna be a sound engineer i just love lighting and lasers

im glad u have mentioned turbo sound cause i couldnt for the life of me remember what it was called but the people from the club were also selling a turbosound speaker setup with digital amps. i think it was 4 tops and 4 bass bins. we really wanted the setup and yet again didnt know how much it was worth

we were extremly stupid ourselves cause we tried the same thing as we had done previously with all the amps and lighting and he blew us off saying he wanted double (we were tring to offer £1100 expecting him to bite our hand off) we turned him down expecting him to come to us in a few days with a middle of the road offer like £1500 but he managed to sell it for £2500. i really wish i had now bought it cause iv heard some really good things about turbosound since

neva mind u win some u lose some and the trackspots were a devo win. hehe

cheers for your advice mate, i dont really live close to u at all but would love for u to show me a bit on magic q at some point.
ill have to try organise summit with u if thats ok

cheers ollie

[norty303]

I'm up in Linconshire next week doing a festival if thats nearer...

Turbo gear will always sell well, the older stuff is designed by Tony Andrews of Funktion 1 before he left to set up his own company, thats why lots of the Flood/Flashlight system phase plugs look similar Some of the older mid top boxes still fetch a grand each. Their processors are rebadged XTA so also worth a pretty penny.

Do you know what the cabs were? At the price I'd guess some of the old TMS range perhaps

[oliverst14@hotmail.com]

aint a clue mate sorry, all i know is they were big and blue and very heavy

[oliverst14@hotmail.com]

looked very similar to this as it had the double drivers

http://media.photobucket.com/image/t...urdoboedup.jpg

gotta be honest i think they are some of the most horrible looking cabs i have ever seen, i think the blue is so tackey but hey what do i know. lol

[madgadget]

Friend of mine has a pretty hardcore PA system. (considering he only uses it a hand full of times a year) Its made up of EV- x array tops and and turbo sound double 18 folded horn cabs, with his own design of PD driver. Its absolutely insane. His dist board power meter will regularly show current draw in excess of 100A @ 240v hehehe