Wireless Speakers

The temperatures are going down and a cool breeze is blowing. The leaves are turning and churches all across the land fire up the fun for the Fall Festival. Since Lake Pointe is a large church they like to do this big and why not, this is Texas after all.
Our job was to cover about 6 acres of parking lot with audio. Since I am the new guy I was there as general labor and had a great time hanging out with all my new friends. In order to cover that much ground on a temporary basis, we used clusters of 2 or 3 powered EV speakers being feed audio via a standard wireless microphone receivers.

The audio was transmitted with an IEM system. We just pulled power to the different clusters around the parking lot. The systems were all set to the same frequency and we turned off the pilot tone feature. A little help from a Professional Wireless Helical Antenna and we had audio everywhere with no dropouts.

And so it begins

New beginnings and adventures are both a bit scary and a lot exciting. I'm slowly learning the new people and processes and systems here at Lake Pointe. Since Lake Pointe is a multi-site church the amount of information that I need to assimilate is significant. Then to add on the fact that LP is a mostly Mac organization means I have learned more new things in the last couple of days than I have in long time.

Since I visited LP the first time about a month ago, they have had the main room retuned. I noticed a dramatic difference the first service I attend this past weekend. It made everything more focused and increased the intelligibility much higher. I'm working on a long write up about system tuning that I will hope to get out soon.

On the home front, I am annoyed that the only internet service I can get is DSL at a max of 3Meg a sec. Why can't the cable company get service where I am living. Its right in the middle of town. I had been very pleased with my cable internet in VA where I was getting a solid 8Meg speed with a burst speed of 16 for the first 20-30 seconds on a big download. Plus I had an extremely stable IP address. It had only changed once in almost 2 years and that was only because it went from Adelphia to Comcast. I neeeeeeeeedddddd my speed! Hopefully in the next day or two I will have some service at home. Till then happy mixing.

Picking up the pace

Life seems to be moving faster again. Its been 2 months now since I had a regular job. Honestly, I think it wasn't until I found another job that began to unwind a bit. I have not had more than a couple weeks at once away from working for almost 20 years, with the exception of being in the hospital for emergency surgery a few years ago. I've had the opprotunity to read a great deal and hear from God about what he wants from me. I believe I'm on the right road.
This is also the first time in more than 10 years that I have not mixed any audio for more than a month. Mixing is a skill in many ways and I almost wonder what the time away from a console might do to my skills. I suspect it may take me longer to get where I want to be with a mix. One of the things that is important in live audio in particular is the ability to get things sounding good very quickly, even if its just a rehearsal. The upside for me lately has been my time just listening to music. I sometimes forget how much pleasure I get from just listening to really good stuff. I've also been able to catch a number of artists in concert on HDNet. They have all been fantastic. I'm trying to catch as many of these as I can, for both enjoyment and for learning. It's amazing to me what I pickup just watching and listening to concerts.
We head to Texas on Wednesday. My wife and I are both very excited to get there. I hope to be able to spend some time my first week getting a handle on all the tech stuff at Lake Pointe. They have so many systems its going to take a while to get up to speed on everything. Like any good geek, I like new toys and can't wait to get started.

Mozart would approve

I would typically never do this but this impressed me so much I simply had to share it. I do think Mozart would approve as well.



The movers will be here on Tuesday! WOW!