Going direct board vs. audience results

[playingdead]

The RUKinder who bought my backup AxeFX Ultra was asking some pretty good questions about the importance of full range full response (FRFR) monitors, which are vital to getting "that sound" when you're using this sort of gear, because if your monitors aren't flat, you'll never get it dialed in correctly; that's why I like the QSC K12 and K10, they are pretty flat, as compared to something like the QSC HRP122i, which is designed as a vocal monitor, and has a pronounced midrange. Then you're fighting the monitor sound and losing the battle overall.

I compared a brief excerpt from the board recording from a show we did in the fall with an audience recording, and found that the guitar sounds pretty much the same on the board as it does in the house ... the whole band does, largely, which is good to hear. The club that night has a non-descript JBL PA, and these were stereo mics on an 8-foot stand by the soundboard.

audience: http://playingdead.net/babyblue11.wav

soundboard: http://playingdead.net/babysbd.wav

If you think about it, Healy used to spend a lot of time EQ'ing and noising the rooms to get the PA as flat as possible, then he'd mike Garcia's cab and not use an EQ on it, so the whole PA became just an extension of Jerry's speakers. It's the same concept with this impulse response technology, and it works quite well,

[Stone]

Yes! Adjusting to the room makes or breaks ya, I love to cross reference the Aud and Sbd tapes of each show. We work with 4 different engineers and 3 of them use Smmart and the other guy says his RTA mics are connected to his head (FYI you can't argue with his results). Until you break down each component and learn whats really going on your leaving alot of performance on the table. House systems are hit and miss, A good house guy who knows his system (rare) can yield awesome results also from working with the same system/room every night.

In recent experiments have been with a POD ProXt direct and going between in-ears or the wedges(EV 1202's). And I found the settings sound alot different between the EV 1202 that I tweaked the settings with and our FOH (JBL Prx 600 series). Not bad different but different enough that it could have went either way. The preset that I tweaked with the in-ears was closer once compared with FOH but still different. Although I feel with just a lil EQ on the in-ears would have made for a better comparison (although different ear buds will have there own qualities just as a speaker will). Were auditioning the idea of either going with In-ears and keeping a few of the EV's or going with all new wedges so we had a in-ear system on loan to get a feel what problems/changes we would experience. This is what really brought on alot of testing. I don't currently use a direct rig however things are evolving that direction.