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[Robert Latham]

in addition to some of the items Jeff mentioned, there is more costs to being a professional PA company than might be apparent. These are some of the things you need to get to the next level.

Rider Friendly Gear: Even if you are working with “B” and “C” level artists, their riders will require good gear and their crew will be easier to work with if you provide quality gear and infrastructure. Riders say things like “No Peavey, No Behringer” for a few reasons. One, it gets the band higher ended gear that is more reliable and Two, it eliminates the lower ended companies that buy crap at music stores and don’t have all the tools and experience required to do a bigger gig.

Power Distribution: most larger venues only provide a “company Switch” or big generator for outside gigs that allows you to connect your Cam Lock connectors or tie in your tails. You will require Feeder cable, a PD (Power distribution box that takes the 3 phases plus neutral and ground and provides breakers and outlets) as well as power cables to all your gear.  In addition, the PA company is responsible for providing outlets onstage for the band’s equipment.

Quality console(s): Good rider friendly consoles cost money and you will need a separate monitor console on many gigs.

Audio Transport: you will need snakes and stage boxes for the gig. Unless you are doing a small event and set up the console next to the stage you will need a long snake along with stage boxes and possibly stage snakes. Digital snake systems and stage boxes are not cheap.

High End Mic Locker: While a seasoned sound tech can probable do most gigs with just “Sticks and Balls” (SM57s and 58s), bands riders usually require a large diaphragm kick mic(s), condensers for overheads, possible specialized horn mics, etc.

Quality Wireless: Good handhelds are usually needed for bands and beltpacks with lavaliers or head worn mics are required at corporates. In Ear Monitor systems also show up on riders.

Lots of stands: Quality mic stands are needed in a few sizes. Shorty booms, tall booms, and a few round base units. Speaker stands, lifts and truss may be required at events. Flying speakers is common at many high end events and rigging equipment like span sets and motors will be needed. In addition a qualified rigger needs to be on the sound company staff even if the venue provides their own riggers at the gig. The qualified person ensures the rig is installed correctly at the gig and makes sure all parts are safe and maintained and maintenanced when at the shop.

Quality DI boxes: Countryman, Radial and Whirlwind, not music store specials are required.

Lots of Cable: Even a small event might require more cable than you think. A pro company brings a ton of mic, snake, speaker and power cables to every gig.

Quality Speakers: Adequate for the number of attendees and the coverage of the audience are. At the Next Level, delay speaker might be required on gigs so the mains are not blasting out those near the stage. Front Fills may also be required on some gigs.

Quality Monitor Speakers: of course you need good monitor boxes, possibly side fills and a drum wedge/sub

Now, what separates the good companies from the rest:

Backups and spares: A good company brings backups like an extra speakers and monitor wedge, tons of extra cables, adapters, turn around, gaff tape, tools, etc. they usually have a work box(s) loaded with stuff “Just-In-Case”

Cases and Covers: A good company shows up with their gear protected and on wheels. Clean Gear is a must at the next level.

Experienced Quality Crew: A good company has quality crew. These folks cost more but make up for it by doing it right the first time and being able to problem solve at the gig.

All of the above costs a lot of money and we have not even mentioned where to store the gear, how to transport the gear to the gig and most important, doing things legally. A real company needs licensing and business insurance in addition to building/gear/truck/car insurance.

Buying some bigger speakers does not get one to the next level.

Great info and pretty much common sense. If I we're to be hired to setup up for a national touring act at American Airlines Center, I assure you I would not be on prosound forums asking questions lol. Unfortunately I have not been contracted to this large of an event, however I will have some city events coming this spring and I'm trying to assure o have the equipment needed to fill those jobs.
So I ask questions of those whom might have legitimate advise.
Thanks Guys
Great info but lots of undue ridicule.
I'm out
I wish you all the best in your endeavors.

[Robert Latham]

I did a walk on sound gig a few years ago. I had two pairs of JRX125 and a pair of PRX618XLF to work with. I put vocals through one pair of tops, rest of the band went through the other pair and the subs. This was in a small town arena for a 5 piece band playing  mainly classic rock. Was it chest thumping loud? Nope. But it got the job done. It's  all in knowing what your gear is capable of, and keep it within its limits.

Thank you
Thats a productive post. Most others were just common sense and ridicule.
So I say than you on my way out the door.

[Scott Holtzman]

Point taken. I understand that more horns from the RFCs do offer better coverage in a more focused pattern. I get the better quality gear gives better response curves. The high end system I mentioned is close to $50k. I just feel that the venue could have satisfactory coverage by a system that is much less cost wise and that's what I'm trying to achieve. No disrespect to anyone here experience. Just looking to get it done as most economical as possible.

Robert - You just aren't listening, the JRX are junk.  The cheapest crap JBL ever made.  The wedding DJ's I work with certainly would not use them.  Maybe in a VFW Hall but not at a "real" wedding that hires production.

You see a lot of crap in bars because mose of the time it is up to the band to bring what they can.  Only the best acts can afford to hire in production for a bar and sometimes what they hire is a joke too.

I am not sure why you are focused on this one client however if they are hiring in a pro company bringing a pro rig I doubt they are going to bring you in just to save a few bucks. 

Besides the expense is not really in the gear.  While 50k may sound like a lot that's a drop in the fucking bucket at that level.  To do a minor league stadium you probably need 10k just in power distribution. 

Labor is the big cost and it cost just as much to bring in a pile of trash as it does a real system.  Setup and strike is the same, same number of techs blah blah.  You need insurance before you can step foot in that stadium and you need a box truck to carry everything.  The PA is one small drop, what if they need 4 channels of wireless, a lighting rig, 6 monitors, sidefills, a monitor mixer.  BTW can you subhire the stage, rig it on wheels and roll it out 15 minutes after the last pitch? 

There is so much more to being in the production business that just owning a few speakers. 

You have received advice from some top notch folks.  Buy a pair of good 18's and tops.  See if you can get someone to pay you $350 a night for that rig then develop your business plan.

Basically you have said, I have these speakers that I think will be loud enough and I am going to build a business around that notion.  See how silly it sounds?

Sorry to be so blunt.

[Brian Jojade]

Great info but lots of undue ridicule.
I'm out
I wish you all the best in your endeavors.

If the honest answers you got in this thread are too much ridicule to take, I wish you the best of luck in your next career.  Soft skin doesn't cut it in this business.

[Scott Holtzman]

I can relate to that. I will take everyone's advice and look into better quality speakers as for dsp and power, I believe  the DBX, BSS, Rane, Sound Craft and Crown equipment I have should be adequate. Or are these brands cheap and not worth using as well?

All of those brands make some decent gear but analog rigs don't sell anymore.

You seem focused on the PA, what about power, cable ramps, rigging, lights etc. 

A PA does not a production company make.

I shudder to even ask but have you ever even worked as crew on a gig of the size you want to do?

[Scott Holtzman]

Thank you
Thats a productive post. Most others were just common sense and ridicule.
So I say than you on my way out the door.

Yeah Craig is a really nice guy.  I believe that most of that came from an article in Live Sound International, he is one of the editors.  Back issues are available on the "mother site".

If you wonder why the comments are getting more terse it's because 3/4 of the people posting own sound companies and folks like you, with ill thought ought business plans and no experience end up degrading the market and pushing the bar downward.

If you haven't spent years working for someone else how are you going to do this on your own?  The only other option is to hire experienced crew (or some balance of the two). 

You made the snarky comment I am not trying to do arenas or touring acts.  A minor league ballpark event is probably about 3-5k in production so that's hardly an entry level gig.  Let me give you my experience.  I have been around theater and audio my whole adult life (almost 40 years) about 8 years ago I was helping out a local theater and tired of the endless volunteer abuse, low budgets and memorizing the lines to high school level plays.  My neighbor has a Tom Petty/Heart tribute act and needed a PA.  So my entrance was somewhat similar to yours.  I came here, despondent over a gig that didn't work well, these guys encouraged me, stuck a few fingers in my chest and I have not stopped listening. 

Hundreds of thousands of dollars now invested and we are finally able to execute at that I consider the entry level of pro production.    We are trying to help you avoid some of the pain. 

I will also admit this thread riled me up as you seem inexperienced at production and you want to foist a JRX rig on unsuspecting clients.  As I mentioned earlier, when you blow a gig it makes us all look bad.  Worse they won't call the company you displaced back in.

[Luke Geis]

I will be honest in saying that when I saw the thread title I was excited that we would get a question about system design. It turned out to be more about will my currently designed system work for XYZ. Then we tell you no it won't TRULY work, and we are being told that we are dick's, minus a couple of people who gave you a gleam of hope.

You can most certainly take that PA anywhere, set it up and make noise come out of it. While having show level SPL at 100' may not seem like an issue to you now, it will be when you are asked to turn it up from someone who is 50' away and you have nowhere left to go. This field of work is mostly about math. You can literally use math to confirm that your PA will provide X db in SPL at X distance. This is the skill that most " Sound Guys " don't actually know or realize is the magical formula that can take you from being ok/average to truly be an asset. It is not just about your ability to mix, you need to be able to take anything thrown at you, be able to put it together and have at least an idea of what it could do. On top of that, you need to know rigging rules, allowable network cable lengths, network setup, how to repair things and most of all the basic math that provides a metric for system performance. It isn't enough to just make noise, you have to know the physics of audio too.

So when we say your system is crap, it isn't because we are bougie, it is because most all of us have worked with a system like that and have learned the hard way that that type of system makes you work very hard for little return. The shortcomings of the PA simply make you spend more time trying to work around the issues instead of just doing the job of mixing things.

The at best possibility has already been shown. You are getting 116db @ 6' away in a room. The simple math alone says that your PA would only then produce roughly 98db at 50' away. You lose -6db for ever doubling of distance, so you would have 3 generations to go out to 50' which is a -18db. This seems to be with pre-recorded media which has a very high crest factor meaning that you can only get that SPL because of that low crest factor. So as a DJ, you can get a pretty decent SPL if needed, but you are working that PA to its limit. Running at the limit is the problem. So as soon as you start eeking the level down to be a safe margin, you are that much further away from being able to produce the SPL that your client may desire. It's not that a PA capable of 133db isn't loud enough, it just isn't loud enough for a very long time before things start breaking down.

You may not have heard about power compression? Power compression is a side effect of heat and it reduces system efficiency. Power compression can reduce your resultant SPL by as much as 10db in extreme cases but typically sets around -3 to -6db pretty reliably. Now if you are working a system to its near limit, the heat goes up, the power compression reduces more efficiency and your SPL drops to a level that just won't work and turning up more only makes the problem worse. As you can now see, losing up to -6db or more can be a problem WITH NO SOLUTION. This is on top of that -16db I was initially talking about.

To clarify a little more, we are not being mean, rude, dick's or bougie about what you have, we are being realistic to outcomes based on our experience. Your system will make noise ( probably plenty of it ), but it can only do so much for so long. You will find in short order how hard it is to work for a PA, instead of the PA working for you. We are perhaps more sensitive about it because we know that people are snaking jobs with crap PA systems and scraping by with them, thus lowering the bar. It is real hard to find value in an industry when there are some out that that keep racing to the bottom. The event production industry is very much a money game, if you want to play, you have to spend lots of money. Doing the gradual growth thing can work, but it takes forever. It took me 5 years to move up a rung and another 5 to jump yet another one. I am 17 years in and I am only just starting to acquire what is considered entry-level pro-grade gear. I am not a hungry businessman and I desired a slow-growth business model. What is different for me is that I am hired to put other larger companies' very expensive systems together. A good portion of my business is simply telling them what they should use, how it should be set up and then executing the task. When I am home, I do small to medium-sized events using a PA system that is of a much higher caliber than most of my direct competition. I am the type of company hurt by the weekend warriors, ankle bitters and low ballers. I charge real day rates, real rental rates and bring real gear, yet bidding against those who will do it for half the price. So yeah, we want everyone we can to be on the same page.

[Chris Grimshaw]

This might've been mentioned, but perhaps not explicitly: speakers that have 2x15" and a 1" HF unit will always sound bad at PA levels. I don't care who makes it or how much they charge. You're either asking the 15"s to go too high, or the 1" to go too low. Either way, it's a mess that a decent 12"/1" will happily destroy in terms of vocal clarity.

800Hz-2kHz-ish will be rough at best, and then you've got a little HF driver working too hard, so >2kHz will have plenty of distortion (you could call it "sparkle", as the HiFi magazines do with ribbon tweeters).

The absolute best thing that could be done here is to stack the tops so there's 3x15"s in a row, and then add a heavy-duty mid-high box in the form of an 8" mid and a 1.4" HF.
Of course, the crossover alignment will need measurement gear.

Chris

[Tim Weaver]

Don't worry guys. I think we ran him off so we can all keep making millions of dollars on our big-name PA gear!

[Chris Hindle]

Don't worry guys. I think we ran him off so we can all keep making millions of dollars on our big-name PA gear!

Millions? Wow. someone has a problem with the decimal place......
Chris.

[ProSoundWeb Community]