Sound control in your home recording environment is paramount. You can't cut corners here......

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

I just finished installing a pair of ISP HDM112 speakers for the First Baptist church in Twins Falls, Idaho. The original system consisted of an Allen Heath GL 3200 32 channel board and a LCR speaker system with Mackie (RCF) 300A for the Left and Right and 2 Community cabs for the cluster. We replaced the RCF speakers with the ISP HDM112. The difference was amazing. The thing that I notice about these speakers is their ability to project sound and their clarity. In a narrow (39’ wide and 39’ ceiling height) room like this its important to have a system that can project to the back of the room without being incredibly loud at the front.

Heading back to Twin Falls ID. This time it's to fix a system that I installed a few years ago. The system consisted of a pair of Mackie (RCF 300A) speakers. This was when Mackie had just bought RCF, and had not taken over production from Italy yet.

Side Note: Mackie had a hard time meeting demand with the factory in Italy so they took over production and eventually outsourced to China.

I recently spec'd two Tascam DM-4800s for a system install. One for recording and one for the FOH.  After some fine tuning on the budget the church decided to drop one the the boards. We decided to use the remaining board as the FOH board and the church will get the other board later.

We are installing a complete Live Recording - Tracking studio for Christ Life Church in Tacoma, WA. They are upgrading their existing live sound system to accommodate live audio recording and live video recording.

This church is blessed with remarkable musical talent. They have produced and recorded their own CD's (in a recording studio) already and now they what to capture their live performance.

What are the pros using for live recording (bands)?

Things have changed rapidly in the way that we record live. We used to use a separate mixer and get a feed from the direct outs of the FOH mixer to record the performance. That practice for a long time only changed slightly when digital multi-track recorders became available. Pro-Tools has become the digital recording program of choice for many years, only because it established a foot hold early. Now things have got real interesting as far as new things to come along.

Digidesign has released the live/recording consoles (The Venue Series) which give Pro-Tools users a real good way to mix and record live, of course this would be at the high end.

Are you having issues with muddy sound from your subs?

Here is a tip:

If possible wire up your subwoofers from a post fader aux send on the board to a graphic EQ then to the subs. See diagram below:

Quantify whether you have the ability to do a rear projection system.

If you can do a rear projection system anything above 2000 lumens will work. Provided the space behind the projector is enclosed and ambient light can be controlled in that enclosure.

What to look for in a projector:

I recently when to a church service where they had a new McCauley M Series system installed. The configuration consisted of  7 x M-90 modules, 1 x M-120,  2 x MS1 and 1 x AC355 per side. The sanctuary is a 80' x 80' x 26' (WxDxH) with a balcony.

The 2 MS1 cabinets where flown in a separate array next to the main array. I noticed some interesting things (no mids) with lots of sizzle in the high end. They had an acoustic guitar player as well as an electric guitar and you couldn't hear either one. The vocals where not very clear either. Because they did almost 90 degrees of vertical coverage they had some slap back and early reflections in the seating area.

When you are ready to start "Live Recording" you will find in your research that you have a lot of options. Which one is the best? First you need to put together a couple of lists. One being the intended audience for the final product (target quality), and how to distribute it (internet, CD, DVD, DVD ROM, etc). Once you got that figured out you can start looking at what equipment and process it would take to do that type of recording. So lets look at an example:

We want to record the pastors message and put it on CD and put it up to the Web Site.

Target Quality: CD = 44KHz / 16 bit  Internet = mp3 format   Studio = 48KHz / 24 bit