six AT10s did great for live sound this year

[davygrvy]

As soon as the photo guy posts his pix, I'll post 'em here.

Last year, I built six AT10s (HL10C loaded) and arranged them in a 3Hx2W sixpack stack for last year's event. This year's music festival, I put them in front of the stage six wide and they acted as stands for the monitors. The stage was only a foot tall, so I couldn't put them underneath. Also different this year, I ran them with three channels off a set of QSC PLX2402 amps for around 1200W per pair run in parallel. I limited to 42V output.

Suffice to say, the bass was just awesome. Power alley was a bit strong due to the horizontal array, but the sweet spot was doing a perfectly calculated 107 spl average with undistorted peaks to 118 (C weighted). pre-eq was a 60Hz lowpass 18db/oct. xover was 90Hz. high-pass set to 28Hz. Graphic was minimal.

The third act was a hip-hop/jazz/fusion thing and used drum triggers and exercised the subs quite nicely. The drum set had a great sounding kick, too, which was easy for Jeff doing the knob twisting to get a good sound for the other acts. Chest thump was ungodly insane to the ones dancing up in front for the last act Even the grass bits that got kicked into the horn mouths were dancing, too

Oh, and speaking of Jeff... The bum works for Digidesign and brought a D-Show console on loan. What an insane board! We were lucky to have his involvement for FOH.



Not surprising, the Cliff & Dan team won the chili cookoff this year.

[davygrvy]

Here's a shot from last year showing the side placed sixpack. Yes, they're fresh off the table saw, no paint or finish. About 200lbs of sand on top to make sure they don't walk like a washing machine.

[jbell]

love the 'sound guy' tshirts......

[davygrvy]

thanks. those were a big hit.

[davygrvy]

The speaker hanging thing turned into the usual clusterf*ck on setup day. I intended the masts to be vertical and turned in 60 degrees and had the whole assembly done a week prior, but at the last minute my work was vetoed by the family in favor of this 6 man move monstrosity that was 5 feet too far forward, but still using my masts. I knew the stage dimensions, but no one told me a tent was coming and was much wider and deeper than the stage. The speakers didn't get hung until 11pm, so I missed the chance to tweak the sound like I intended.


These are the best shots of the subs.

[Mikey]

Looks like a lot of fun! Glad it went well again. DRs next on your agenda?

[davygrvy]

Thanks Mickey. I'm still licking my wounds for the parts that didn't go as I intended. The tremendous chest pounding, drop your bowels bass was everything I wanted.

I'm not sure if there will be a next time for me as I'll choose not to be put myself through the meat grinder of 'lack of communication wait till the last minute, oh hell' yet again.

Now if Rob would apologize to me or at least own-up to his tremendous screw ups... maybe, given some new requirements. Now if they were paying me... that's a different story.

I wanted to do DR280s originally, but ran out of time. This year, I only had two months notice, so again, no DRs. Those EVM-12S' in my custom cabs kicked ass anyways. Mids were beamy, about the only thing I didn't like about 'em. They crossed @ 5K to the EV DH3s, FYI. This year I changed the box volume for extended bass tuning to 80Hz instead of prior years mistake doing a QB3 alignment which put Fs at 180Hz. That was a big hole. Silly me.

Oh, a fully time aligned system is wonderful! Truly amazing. The low-end was so even passing through the 90Hz cross to the subs. I had about 10 feet of delay on the mid-bass and 11 feet on the tweets. I measured it out with a tape ruler and added the 6.81 feet of the sub path length.

[Mikey]

I must have missed the fact that you've been doing these chili cook-offs for free. Are there proceeds that go to a charity?

I suppose you've probably already thought about it, but you really should consider letting that gear make some money for you, at least to pay for itself. DJ gigs can make you good money, especially weddings. You probably already have most of the gear you would need to do it, maybe way more even LOL. Hell, I take the rare DJ gig that happens to fall in my lap, charge $500, and I'm told that I grossly under-charge! If you were making some cash for most gigs, the occasional freebie wouldn't be such a burden.

Even with the "surprises" at this year's event, it looks to me like the people had a great time, which is a success in my book. With any music gigs, everything rarely goes exactly the way you want it to, without a hitch. Overcoming "ISSUES" is just part of the job, but actually solving the problems is what sets you apart as a pro. Sounds to me like you handled it like a pro.

[davygrvy]

I must have missed the fact that you've been doing these chili cook-offs for free. Are there proceeds that go to a charity?

Yes, proceeds go to the Alzhiemer's Association of Northern California. They usually raise about $35K per festival. The Smith family is the top private contributor in northern California.

I suppose you've probably already thought about it, but you really should consider letting that gear make some money for you, at least to pay for itself. DJ gigs can make you good money, especially weddings. You probably already have most of the gear you would need to do it, maybe way more even LOL. Hell, I take the rare DJ gig that happens to fall in my lap, charge $500, and I'm told that I grossly under-charge! If you were making some cash for most gigs, the occasional freebie wouldn't be such a burden.

Yes, I've thought about it... and I'm still thinking about it The happiest result I can think of is to sell off the subs as a set, put the midbass drivers back in my marshall 4x12 cab, keep the tweeters, and craigslist the empty midbass cabs.

Even with the "surprises" at this year's event, it looks to me like the people had a great time, which is a success in my book. With any music gigs, everything rarely goes exactly the way you want it to, without a hitch. Overcoming "ISSUES" is just part of the job, but actually solving the problems is what sets you apart as a pro. Sounds to me like you handled it like a pro.

Yes, Rob keeps reminding me that everyone had a blast and thought it sounded great. And it did sound great except for the big vocal-less hole right up in front. The part that fumes me is that all this was preventable with a bit of pre-planning. The pre-planning I was endlessly calling Rob about daily 2 weeks prior, but he was skipping meetings and not returning my calls. The worst part is he feels he doesn't owe me any apology for causing the mess he did. He won't even own-up to his bunders about not knowing a tent was coming... The tent that was too big that caused the big part of the mess. Oh, so he can step on my face, but I don't have permission to say get off my freakin' face.

According to my wife, who's into this stuff, Rob being a sagitarious (free spirit) and me being a taurus (perfectionist) doesn't make for a successful team when the sag is in charge.

[Mikey]

The happiest result I can think of is to sell off the subs as a set, put the midbass drivers back in my marshall 4x12 cab, keep the tweeters, and craigslist the empty midbass cabs.

With your interest, knowledge, and enthusiasm, I'm surprised that you'd be happiest just walking away from it all.

You forgot the part about putting the 4x12 Marshall cab on CraigsList and building Bill's new guitar cab design!

[davygrvy]

With your interest, knowledge, and enthusiasm, I'm surprised that you'd be happiest just walking away from it all.

I've lost my interest in live sound. I heard my GOD system and now I'm done. Time to go back to calculating tapped horns and other HT related hobby things which also happens to be related to my job (home theater speaker system design).

Thanks for the peptalk, though, I'm still sick from this whole affair.

You forgot the part about putting the 4x12 Marshall cab on CraigsList and building Bill's new guitar cab design!

I'm good thanks. I have my perfect 70s 'chunka chunka' tone. More amp experiments would be my direction, like a feedback-less triode push/pull driver for tone with a gain-less mosfet power stage (for good damping). Feedback-less triode output stages have great tone, but have too high an output impedance to drive a load without having the tonality modified.

[davygrvy]

Andrew and Jeff prepping the stage around 9:30am before the crowd

'Shotgun Wedding Quintet' was excellent. Very artful mix of hip-hop and jazz.

Only the sober ones are not allowed to dance on the subs.

[davygrvy]

Party host, Rick (the Colonel), joins in for a little "walk the dog" With Joey Fender.

[Tom Smit]

Very good pics....clean, sharp, bright,....and nice looking cabs too!

TomS

[davygrvy]

...and nice looking cabs too!

Thanks, the rat fur and edging gave them that pro look. Like $180 or so for the parts. But 4 hours of labor per cab. Had to buy a little bandsaw for the metal cutting.