Cheap PA Systems for the masses!

Is the availability of pro audio equipment to the masses making sound in general better or worse? A quick search on Thomann can get you a little PA system like this, ready to go. Just throw in a mic or 2 and for under a thousand quid you have a gig!

With the rise in technology, and the affordability of equipment like this, a new breed of “sound engineers” has appeared in the world. A group of amateurs who think they can achieve the same results as a professional would have. They can suddenly be at the same level as someone who took years to study his art, and years to perfect it.  Now this new guy on the block, money in hand,  goes to Thomann and buys the same equipment that a pro would have and voila, a new genre of professionalism is born.  The lack of experience doesn’t matter anymore.   He can now buy his experience – because as far as most people are concerned, having sound equipment is all that you need. As long as someone knows how to plug it in, it will be fine.

But is this good or bad?

There are many parts to that answer, but before I answer it I must point out that I am aware that there are some cases where “anyone” can do the gig and that is perfectly fine. It will sound just fine, and realistically, a professional wouldn’t do any better. But these cases are always at the very low end of live sound – an area where good engineers don’t want to be anyway.

I am not for one moment trying to say that anyone who buys equipment from Thomann and does a gig for very little money is a bad engineer. Some of them are very good. And your gig might sound great! That is brilliant for you – hang on to him/her for as long as you possibly can.

But these guys are cheaper…

Well they are obviously going to be a lot cheaper than a reputable sound provider. Of course this is good for the band or musician. But what happens if you take this analogy on board:

You have the option of paying a doctor in your local GP’s office €60 to diagnose your symptoms and provide a cure. But you could also go to a back-alley doctor who is operating a practice illegally and most likely without proper qualifications. Yes, he will only charge you €20, but I severely doubt that you will go to him!

But how can this real doctor charge 3 times more? Because he has spent years studying his art, and you are not paying for the 5 minutes you are in with him – you are paying for the years he spent learning how to be a doctor.

Now take that example further – the doctor is your sound engineer, and your health is your bands sound! If the doctor messes up, you will be worse off!

But his last few gigs sounded great…

If you were smart enough to pop along to some other gig that your new potential “engineer” is mixing, it will give you a great insight into the quality of his work. If it sounds crap, you can just go and get someone else. But if it sounds good, does that mean that you should book him straight away? Certainly have a chat with him, and see if he is available.

But again there is a caveat to this. He may have worked with that band many times before, and after months of fine tuning has managed to get it sounding great. Your show will be a lot different, and you will need someone who can adjust quickly and notice and resolve problems instantly. A good engineer will know straight away what is wrong with the mix, and fix it. This will make your first show sound as good as any other show you will play. “I don’t know the band” is no excuse.

Basing your judgement on a past gig may not answer all your questions. His equipment might be working fine at the gig you saw, but what if something goes wrong? Does he carry spares? Probably not. Does he know how to fix things when they do go wrong? Probably not. A good engineer has gone through all these problems before, and has the experience to deal with them correctly. He also will have connections or possibly the sound company to back him up with replacements.

But you did it too…

He knows his stuff...

Yes I did! It’s how most people start. But I also made mistakes at those gigs, and learnt from those mistakes. Mistakes that will never happen at one of my gigs now. All I am saying is to not to skimp on your sound budget. If you want it to be done right, pay for it to be done right.

There are plenty of gigs where the amateurs can practice and learn. Leave them doing those gigs. Lots of them will develop into very experienced and skilled sound engineers. Book them when they reach this stage. If you are only at this stage yourself, then thats fine. But as soon as you are at the higher level, book a sound engineer who is at or above your level.

You get what you pay for is the most true statement when talking about sound engineers.

Look at an engineers portfolio. Check up on his/her testimonials. If an artist was genuinely happy with the sound, they will be happy to pass this information on. Do your research. If it is too good to be true, then it probably is! You get what you pay for!

Will that Midas desk really make your band sound better? Surely that Klark Teknik graphic cant make a whole lot of difference? Pay €100,000 for a PA or €10,000?

€18.50

€109

All the above questions are questions that I have asked myself before – other than the band bit, so in my case my client’s band. I ain’t gonna say buy the most expensive gear you can find, and I ain’t gonna say “just buy cheap shit”. With a combination of skill and knowing “the right tool for the job”, this post will show you how to maximize the rewards of spending your hard earned cash!

I like examples to help illustrate my points – so lets base this example on a recent gig. A few months ago, I set up a full PA system in Conary Community Hall. Quite a big system for a small venue – 4 subs and 2 tops. I placed 3 wedges on the stage. I set up a desk for front of house mix. The gig was a stop on a headline tour with Clive Barnes and Luan Parle, so audio quality was paramount.

Click for a larger view of the setup

I had planned to use Shure SM58′s as the mics for all the vocals – Gav Ralston, Luan Parle and Clive Barnes. But all of my 58′s were out on hire, and the person got stuck in Galway so couldn’t deliver them back in time. I had to dig to the bottom of the mic drawer, and embarrassingly had to bring a bunch of Behringer mics to the gig. I had bought them ages ago for dry hire to singer/songwriters etc. Ideal for that type of gig, but I didn’t put much faith in them for a very high end show!

Anyway, soundcheck time came and went. Then gig time came and went. Then many comments like the following came:

Best sound on the tour

- Gav Ralston (Musician with Luan Parle)

You outdid yourself tonight. The sound was fantastic.

- Pat Nolan (Conary Community Hall)

Thanks to Eoin on Sound. It makes our live’s so much easier when the sound is good.

- Luan Parle

Surprisingly these €20 mics sounded amazing!

Gav and Luan giving it socks!

So what just happened here? If I was buying equipment specially for this gig, and had known how these cheap mics would sound, would there be any point in spending 6 times more money to get Shure mics? No is in fact the correct answer. A different mic may have sounded different, but probably not better. In this case, the cheap Behringer mic was the right tool for the job.

But, there are many other factors to consider. Factors about the gig that I purposely neglected to mention at the start. I had a very high quality PA system for front of house. Monitors were exceptional EV wedges. I was mixing on a Yamaha 01v digital mixing console. The room naturally had nice acoustics. I spend 3 times longer setting the EQ on the mics than I would have if they were SM58′s.

So where does this leave us in regard to the original questions:

Will that Midas desk really make your band sound better?

If your PA system is crap, then no desk will make it sound better. If your sound engineer is crap, no desk will make it better. If your desk is crap but all the rest of the equipment is amazing, and you have a good sound engineer behind that crap desk – then it is very possible to have a fantastic sounding gig.

Surely that Klark Teknik graphic cant make a whole lot of difference?

Again, if the engineer can’t set a Behringer graphic EQ correctly, what makes you think a more expensive EQ will sound better? However, a quality engineer with a quality graphic can lead to stunning results!

Pay €100,000 for a PA or €10,000?

Again, if any part of the signal chain is degraded by worse equipment or people, your €100,000 PA can sound like a €100 PA. And the flip side to that… Good equipment and a good engineer can make your €10,000 PA sound like a €100,000 PA!

I’m confused… Do I buy the cheap shit?

Well, I think the main bit of advice is to invest in knowledge rather than expensive equipment. Do not get expensive equipment as a compromise for someone who knows their stuff. No matter how much you spend, your sound will not magically get better.

If you can’t drive, buying a flashy new expensive car won’t make you pass your test! Same goes for audio equipment!

Gavin Ralston, Luan Parle & Clive Barnes

Guess what I am going to say now… Yep – lets use an example!!!!

First you select your desk...

I was booked for a gig with the Dublin Glee Choir. The spec was 9 choir mics, one solo mic, keyboard, guitar and drum machine. 3 monitor mixes. The LS9 was the perfect choice for this gig. Due to venue restrictions, I was aware that it would be a tight get-in. I needed to get as much done as I possibly could before the gig. But the LS9 wasn’t going to be back untill Saturday morning – the day of the gig. In comes Studio Manager – the offline editing software for the family of Yamaha digital mixing consoles.

...then start working on your show...

All you need to do is download the specific editor for whatever type of desk you have. I frequently use the 01V, the LS9, the M7CL and the PM5D, so I have these editors installed. As I was going to be using the LS9, I just selected that. You then arrive at an overview page showing the mixer on your screen. Here you can click rather than hunt through pages on the actual board. Silly things like turning on phantom power can be achieved in seconds on all the channels that need it.

A blank show file also starts with all the dynamics turned off. I like to have the compressors on, but with the threshold at -8dB so I can bring the compressor in when I need it, without having to flick over to the ON button, so I just click DYN2 on all the channels and this is done for me!

It is also very easy to set your mute groups and channel links. I wanted the choir on one mute group, the band on another, and the effects on a different group. This is achieved very easily and quickly on the “Mute Group” page. It would take considerable time to do this on the console, and if under a lot of pressure, you may just not have time to do it.

Input Patch List

Input and Output routing is much easier in Studio Manager rather than on the desk. You get a visual view of it in Studio Manager and can change your patch with a few clicks.

And aside from all the wonders it can do before the show, it also comes in very handy during the gig. You can leave any screen open in studio manager, while you work on a separate screen on the desk. For example, you could have the EQ screen open on the console, while monitoring all the input meters on the computer screen!

I am very impressed with Studio Manager, and am looking forward to using software from other manufacturers for their boards!

It was only a school’s graduation mass. But it was in an Olympic sizes basketball court, and there was a choir and a small band to work around! The place came also with a free 12 second reverb!!

The Room

The venue - an Olympic sized basketball court!

The first challenge was getting over the extra long reverb that the room naturally created. You could not understand someone shouting across the hall at you! It would be impossible to have a conversation.

So we deployed a system of “delay” speakers midway down the hall. The aim of this was to keep the SPL, or overall volume lower but with even coverage throughout the entire hall. There will be a blog post soon on this very topic which will go into more detail on delays and how they work.

Basically though, we measured the distance between the main speakers and our delay speakers, and taking the air temperature into account, we worked out the time it would take for the sound to travel from the main speakers to the delays and programmed the system accordingly.

The Stage

The Stage

The stage contained an alter and a podium. I put a nice goose neck AKG podium mic on the podium, and a Shure SM87 on a stand in front of the alter.

There were many different guests and students speaking at the podium, so I compressed that channel quite hard to save me mixing it too much. When some people were talking it took nearly 18dB’s of gain out, while others didn’t even hit the compressor.

The same went for the alter – sometimes the priest was directly in front of the mic, and other times he was quite far away and off axis to it. I just compressed it very hard to keep it even.

The Band and Choir

The "Choir"

Ok, band may be a bit of an exaggeration. There were 2 acoustic guitars and an electric piano. We DI’d all of these, and placed 2 wedges in the area so the choir could hear the band. I also sent a small bit of the Alter mic to those wedges so the choir could hear their cue from the priest.

In front of the choir, I placed 2 AKG condensor mics quite high. In between these 2 stands there was a Shure SM58 for some solo songs.

The Mix!

Small size, but all the power I needed - 01V!

I decided to mix on the Yamaha 01v for its flexibility and power in such a small size. I needed lots of compressors for this gig, and the 01v was the right choice with these built in.

I wasn’t aware that the lights were being turned off half way through the mass to show a slide show presentation, so I grabbed the nearest candle and managed to see the desk again! Other than that, the gig couldn’t have gone better – a bit of maths and lots of smart thinking rescued a gig which could have been a disaster!

This one should be obvious…. if it is 19″ wide, and has rack ears, it really should be in a decent flight case! If you have not got that far yet, bookmark this page and come back when your delivery arrives! Even the ABS Plastic racks are fine. Just some sort of protection for the equipment inside is absolutely necessary.

Along with protection, flight cases save time:

Power

You can have all your mains wired up before you take the lid off the case! You don’t have to do anything fancy with this. A plugboard on the inside of the rack. When you need to set up, you just drop the power cable out and everything is immediately powered up!

Or you could take this a little bit further. We have cut all our IEC cables to the exact length that is required (obviously leaving enough slack to route them neatly). This stops the back of the rack from getting cluttered up with lots of cable bunched up.

Looms

Realistically, if you have more than one signal cable coming out of the rack then you should use a loom. Looms take many different “cores” or cables through one lead, which is a lot neater. We have 16 compressors in a rack, and all the inserts go through one loom. Can you imagine 16 seperate insert leads coming out of the back of the rack? It would be a nightmare.

Patchbays

When you have everything inside and plugged in, it can get difficult to get at the stuff you need. Patchbays are a great way of keeping what you need to touch on the outside. You shouldn’t (hopefully) need to touch your power connections ever again, so they can be left. But inputs and outputs work great on a patchbay. See my example below!

Cable ties

Cable ties are very handy to neaten things up – but be very careful! Don’t go over the top! Leave yourself some slack in case you need to change something quickly. Make sure you don’t have to strip the entire rack just to change a fuse!

With this warning in mind – go have fun with cable ties! Tie mains power together up one side of the rack. Tie signal together down the other side.

Now lets see a nice rack!

I snook a camera into the warehouse to bring you these exclusive photo’s…. Enjoy!

Loom for signal, small patchbay for antenna inputs, 16A mains power input and output

There is a lot going on in there, but with a few cable ties and some smart thinking, it can be kept nice and neat!

Cable ties are your friend - but can turn on you!

All our network connections for WSM (Wireless Systems Manager) go into a hub stuck to the top of the rack. Out of the way, but we can still see status lights.

A simple patchbay for outputs from an amp rack

Flight cases make the rack look good from the front too!