Last night the MD used a new mike. I saw the red light clipping frequently.
Nothing I could do about that except fade the mike so the speaker could not be heard on the PA.
It really needed the pad on the RF transmitter turned on.
But it highlighted that it would be nice to have a yellow light on the channel strip to alert you that peaks could cause clipping if you dont lower the faders some. Right now there is a signal detected light and a green ok light and a red clip light. Adding the yellow warning light would be helpful to warn that headroom is too low.
That could help but I do not have privileges to make that change being a mere user not administrator.
The MD is afraid to change anything since it is finally all ‘working’ after they installed it. Which did not follow what I read in books and magazine as the right process to set it up. Nothing is EQed on the LR output but all the inputs have crazy EQ patterns done to stop feedback. Why didnt they ‘tune’ for the room first?
And this may or may not be a permanent mike change, and he is up to his alligators doing music, so does not need more time spent making constant changes to the board depending what RF mike the speaker wants to attach to the transmitter.
Still seems like a good idea to be warned that you are getting close to clipping with the yellow light not surprised when it actually happens and it is too late to fix that problem when it distorts at the clips.
Make sure the tramitter is not being overloaded, check for peak or meter levels on the receiver, adjust transmitter with someone eleses voice talking\singing about how loud the MD is. That will get you close.
If you can’t adjust the input gains on the mixer go to the wireless receiver and turn it down. If it has an adjustment it will either a pot on the back or in the set up menue.
It sounds like the install company is kind of clueless!
Since you have no way of making gain changes on the board, a yellow light won’t help you. Also, I believe the red led lights at around 3db before actual clipping starts, giving you last second headroom.
the yellow lights should help most people.
I can lower the faders if the signal gets that hot.
What I can not fix is clips after the fact no matter what editing program I use.
I can hope there is some extra hidden headroom AH tucked in their to protect us:)
The sound was plenty loud so I did not use the headphones like I often do.
I could not hear the clipping distortion on the speakers at church that night.
However I do not have golden ears. I wondered why the music director didn’t note it.
Maybe it was under that extra 3dB you mentioned.
We are using old shure wireless SM52 type wireless mikes. Still planning to get new ones on safe frequencies by next summer when the current ones are OBE by FCC rules. The install company is the music director who does double duty.
The transmitter may well be overloaded. It was set on max like we have for the regular preacherman. We had a guest who had all kinds of problems with the ear piece in the AM so the MD rigged up a clip on mike with the same transmitter. There are 3 settings on the transmitter and it was left on high like the regular preacherman needs with his around the ear mike.
If it had been set down lower, by the switch on the transmitter, then we should have avoided the problem. Overworked music director who had to scramble to find the clip on mike to replace the over the ear one the regular pastor uses did not test the gain needed with that mike when we switched it for the evening service.
Good point. I sit next to the receivers but did not think to try to turn that one down.
Still think the yellow lights on the board would be useful. I looked at different screens to see what the levels were but only the lights on the front by the faders seemed to note the clipping with the red light. The screens seemed to show it hitting the point where compression started but never clipping. I presumed they were looking at a different spot in the signal flow and that the clip light above the faders was correct.
It is the RF version of the shure SM58 mike. Looks and acts like the SM58 but has an extension underneath presumably with the other RF circuitry. Other than that it looks like an SM58 mike. We have matching mikes and receivers where we can pick a number of channels to use. It looks like the pgxd24/sm58 pictures, except our mike seems to have a different switch and display. They are definitely shure mikes. They are old and we have to replace them by summer due to new FCC rules. Four are handheld and one is a body pack transmitter with choice of earheld or lapel mike.
I refuse to blame the MD for problems when he is clearly overworked and audio is a side task to the music.
We have another guy in charge of the audio committee but he travels a lot for business.
The MD has a lot of experience with the audio and they used an old AH analog board before getting the new Qu32. He seems to know his way around the board better than I do. But he is not an engineer; his strong suit is music and directing the choir and other events with music involvement. Plus he has many contacts to help bring in outside people for guest appearances.
I also understand his dont fix it if it aint broke (now) approach. The whole audio team had a tough learning curve on the new board having just expanded with new volounteers with varied backgrounds.
I looked at meters on two screens. None of them agreed with the input light on the board strip.
Both went near peak but the meters under home showed it in yellow; and the one on the processing screen showed it high but the compressor on the right seemed to be stopping it from going too high.
That may have been AFL not PFL. I do not remember if I tried to change the setting on that.
The idea for the light was more normal usage like when recording in a studio. I know it would not help if there are settings which I cannot change with regular user permissions. I might have been able to fix it with the superstrip but we were all told to never touch those controls no matter what so I did not try using that approach.
Volounteer you seem to be the “head” of the sound techs just by your presence here, wanting to learn everything about your church’s Qu. Continue getting completely familiar with the board, study the manual, watch YouTube tutorials (there are many), then propose to the overworked MD that you would be willing to help him with this aspect of his duties. Mixing sound is not a set and forget process, especially if you’re dealing with singers and musicians. Having proper gain from the start is really one of the most important aspects of mixing. It’s like building a home on rock instead of sand, if you get what I mean.
If you have the PGXD sysetem you do not need to worry of your operation frequencies, if you have an older PGX system then you could have a 600mhz issue.
You keep failing to reconginze that this is actually your problem…
“I refuse to blame the MD for problems when he is clearly overworked and audio is a side task to the music.
We have another guy in charge of the audio committee but he travels a lot for business”
Your church is in serious need of bringing in an outside person knows their stuff to go through your
system front to back and get propoerly set up and then turn it over to the staff for operation with some
training.
Look up the artice titled something like The Reason Churchs Buy Three Sound Systems.
You guys fall into the example given of church staff who knows barely enough to be dangerous taking on the sound system
installation, upgrade, whatever.
As for channel clipping, it does not have to come directly from the input gain being set too high.
If you are appling a lot of EQ boost and or make up gain with the compressor stage that could cause
the channel to clip.
Not really head at all. Just more interested and have more time to learn as much as possible.
We have 3-4 experienced people. Two who ran the board for 11 year so far. Although the digital version is new to them.
And we have 3-4 new volounteers to try to help spread the workload.
I try to help the MD but I do not push if he does not like an idea. He does have more experience in some areas than I do although they are mostly analog and he certainly knows music far better than I do.
I am hoping the committee head will be more involved now, and I will keep him informed as best I can but it is really up to him and the MD to make decisions and spend money.
I did help fix the audio problem with the video camera. Turns out it had AGC and a lot of noise but turning the gain way down while we fed it from the matrix-1/2 output fixed the voice problem for utoob use. I am hoping we can increase the gain another ten dB on the matrix and lower the camera input sensitivity some more too, and stop all the [mostly white] noise on the camera headphone monitor out although the choir mikes can pick up some voices if they are not muted. There appeared to be a near constant 10dB space below the max on the matrix-1/2 routing screen so boosting it and turning on compression to stop clipping should work to help the camera sound.
With the camera built in mike we get every voice everywhere so we use the camera’s microphone input which the manual says is really at consumer line input levels.
It took a bit for the others to grok how the sound was getting to the camera at all. Spaghettilike cable problem:) They thought that matrix-1/2 was going to an interface box with headphones plugged in (and I think could hook to the PC for recording but has not been used that I have seen). And one peraon had thought the matrix out was going to the CD recorder via a mix, but that CD input was actually from the alternate TRS out paralleling the LR outputs.
If your camera only has an 1/8 inch input jack it wants to see a mic level input, you need a proper line to mic level
interface between the board and the camera, I would use a transformer iso type.
Until you do that you will have noise on the camera audio.
If your camera has professional XLR inputs some where on the camera either in the form of old fashioned switches or in a
set up menu you want to select line input for the XLR’s.
That is what I had thought. The manual says -64dBV for the mike input BUT another place it said -10dBV. So I cannot say for sure as apparently canon is clueless about the audio as all they talk about is the video and barely mention the audio at all and gave conflicting data about it.
For sure it does have a humongous AGC range.
When the kid running video set the audio meter in the middle of the scale like the manual said to do, there was a lot of background sound plus white noise. When we lowered the audio level in the video camera and used the matrix-1/2 output then the voices were perfect when the pastor talked, and some background noise from the choir mikes when they were on at other times. The white noise problem was gone for speech which was the immediate goal for utoob use.
Now, why did the noise problem start in the first place? I infer that it had all been fine until something else was done somewhere. Unfortunately I do not know everything that somebody does to any of the equipment in the balcony. At times other people may use our equipment when we are not there. No idea if they could have changed the camera settings. Scene recall should protect us from any changes on the Qu32 as only the MD has the magic password for administrator.
I have heard they are planning to get a new camera in the future. I will certainly lobby for one that we can control the audio a lot better. There should be no internal white noise on the camera, and we should be able to totally mute the built in camera mike , and also be guaranteed that we can use the matrix output okay. We can always lower the matrix level to match so that is not as big an issue as the noise problem we had.
I really wish they would mute the choir mikes all the time unless they are actually singing. But the MD is trying to have one set up that is as easy as possible for ANY volounteer to use; ideally only using mutes and faders, with a the softkey muting many mikes at once to simplify that action, so really only the pastor’s mike needs to be opened and one soft key pushed when he talks. To simplify things (for him?) the MD has only one scene for Sunday that is recalled to ensure starting at a known baseline. Looking at who we have for volounteers, that actually might be easier than having a dozen scenes that kept being selected next but were each specialized for a given event on stage.
Your MD’s mindset of a one size fit’s all preset combined with operators who don’t understand the basic
concepts of audio production are subjecting your congregation to audio mediocrity at best.
garyh summed it up “. Mixing sound is not a set and forget process, especially if you’re dealing with singers and musicians. Having proper gain from the start is really one of the most important aspects of mixing. It’s like building a home on rock instead of sand, if you get what I mean.”
Again you need to bring in outside help for system set up and trainging.
The MD is overworked. He has some very good people but is also trying to train new ones too.
And simplifying everything is not bad as this is not a light dazzling rock concert but just a church service.
And people make mistakes even the experienced ones when too much is happening at once that they have to do themselves.
We are not really mixing anything, certainly not like I do in my home studio. We are just getting the right mikes on at the right time and muting the ones we dont need at a given time. Some folks talk louder or hold the mike closer so we do adjust the faders for that. Once the system is set up there is no need for anyone to be diddling the super strip, or routing and processing screens, yada yada.
The biggest job is really getting the video which is done by other people, and playing back CD tracks when necessary. Also we often have one person clicking on slides when they need to be changed on screen. But the basic board operation could be done with just the basic level operator privileges when the mixes are finalized.
We brought in the dealer for initial set up. And some later tweaking too. I was not there so do not know who did what or why. The gain staging is now good if we do not make changes like that lapel mike required. That was a last minute change at request of the speaker which caused the possible problem. The sound was good on the PA but I have not listened to the recording to see if it had problems.
For a modest sized church I would say that things were done reasonably well although not as well as I was used to back when I was working for fortune 100 companies using their CMMI verified processes.