ProSoundWeb Community

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Pages: 1 [2]  All   Go Down

Author Topic: Effect of digital latency on phase in monitor solution  (Read 8488 times)

TJ (Tom) Cornish

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4317
  • St. Paul, MN
Re: Effect of digital latency on phase in monitor solution
« Reply #10 on: July 27, 2011, 01:54:40 PM »

without an A/B check, it's hard to say wheter there is a combfilter or not.
If you combine the two bass signals in a headphone mixer, you will hear a big difference between between the single signals and the combined one. As long as there is just a constant delay, this may or may not be a problem for your bass player. It justs adds additional "eq" to the signal.
It would drive a vocalist crazy, but for bass it could work.
I know from experience this does not work.


If the EQ in the mixer also affects the monitormix, there is no way to predict how the two signals combine.
If you need a cheap solution for "more me", you could send the two signals to different ears, most humans have two of them.

Another problem for the bass player will propably be IEM itself, most of them need to feel what they're playing.

IEM's not cheap, and the earbuds are the cheapest part of it. Best would be a dedicated monitorconsole and operator.
They gonna need almost everything on iem, including the congregation.

Is there a real need to use IEM? Unless stage volume is a really big problem, the musicians will propably be happier with 5-6 wedge mixes.
Most of the time stage volume is a really big problem.  In our church, the two biggest improvements to sound have been:

1.  a complete iso booth for drums - this in itself saved about 10dB of stage volume
2. IEMs - as many as possible, wireless or wired.

There is no question that there's an adjustment period, but it can be done, and in many cases should be done, for the good of the whole congregation, not just the comfort of the band.  I play keys, bass, and lead worship, depending on the week, as well as running sound - so  I can speak with experience from several positions on this issue.  Good IEM buds make all the difference in the world, and they work fine for bass. 

There are a few musicians around who may refuse to play with in-ears, but I would suggest that that's a pretty selfish attitude, considering the other couple hundred or more people in attendence who are negatively affected by stage volume.  Church cultures vary, but I've done the transition twice now at different churches, and once over the "I don't like change" hump, things really get better.  A phased rollout may help - start with bass and drums and get them used to in-ears before moving on to the rest of the band, etc.

A monitor board is great, but we've had great success with monitors at FOH - particularly with a digital board and scene recall.  The biggest issue for us is having to share the same compressor settings between FOH and monitors (we are low on channels and can't Y the input to two channels easily) - we've had to ask the sound guys to go easy on vocal compression.  Other than that, for us having one board and one operator is better than the complexity and staffing issues of having a separate monitor world.
Logged

Chris Shaw

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 19
Re: Effect of digital latency on phase in monitor solution
« Reply #11 on: July 27, 2011, 06:50:17 PM »

Thanks again for your responses. Tom (TJ), it looks like we have a lot of things in common with our setups.

The primary reason for moving to IEM is because we want to live multitrack record the home grown songs that have arisen through our worship team. The resulting reduction in stage volume will of course help the signal qualities for the recording a lot, as well as making the live mix clearer, and hence quieter, too.

Personally I'm happy with monitor wedges, but then I've done the whole secular sound engineering thing where much higher stage volumes teach/necessitate good mic and monitor techniques. I've also learnt it takes a long time to pass on such experience to a newbie in a church. A primary goal of our new system is that it will be much easier for an inexperienced operator to provide good sound, thus spreading the workload.

The new system will involve pre-assigning each of the Roland's M-300 eight auxillary sends to a monitor mix and then always using the same assignments. Probably 1) Drums/percussion, 2) Bass, 3) Keys, 4) Spare, 5) Lead/guitar 1, 6) Guitar 2, 7) Vox lead & 8) B Vox. It would be rare that all mixes would be needed for any given event. So during setup we'd select the necessary input channels from a library, depending on who's playing that week, which will bring in all the basic settings for each channel including the basic monitor mix levels. (This is particulary necessary because, rather than seperate bands, we have a worship 'squad' of 20-30 people and every week is a different combination of people.) That way we can create all the basic mixes very quickly which can then be tweaked as necessary.

I had hoped to keep the number of monitor mixes lower but it doesn't look like that'll be possible now.

Back to IEM - because of the cost we'd likely only run two channels of wireless and the rest would be wired. Tom - what wired headphone amplifiers do you use and would you recommend them?? I'm looking for half decent single channel mono/stereo units rather than a rack of four for example. Preferably they'd take a balanced input and power would be mains voltage IEC/powercon rather than low voltage, but I realise that the latter is not common.

Thanks again.
Logged
Chris Shaw
Tech Team Lead
King's Community Church, Hatfield, England

Frank DeWitt

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1010
    • LBP DI Box
Re: Effect of digital latency on phase in monitor solution
« Reply #12 on: July 28, 2011, 09:53:14 AM »

Quote
Quote

Is there a real need to use IEM? Unless stage volume is a really big problem, the musicians will propably be happier with 5-6 wedge mixes.

I disagree with this.  I think IEMs are the best thing since the PA system. I wouldn't be without it.  I would not design a new system or buy a different mixer without understanding exactly how to support IEMs.  Our Worship team visits other churches once in a while and our IEMs are not portable.  Both the WT members and the the sound guys miss them.

In our case they are controlled by individual personal mixers.   250 - 300 church

Better sound
Better control of the mix
More control of house volume.

Frank
Logged
Not to Code

ProSoundWeb Community

Re: Effect of digital latency on phase in monitor solution
« Reply #12 on: July 28, 2011, 09:53:14 AM »


Pages: 1 [2]  All   Go Up
 



Site Hosted By Ashdown Technologies, Inc.

Page created in 0.021 seconds with 24 queries.