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Do you do AV at your church or other group events?

A few months ago joined the AV team at my church and have slowly become more comfortable with the equipment. We don't have anybody that really qualifies as a "pro" but some are certainly better at it than others. The majority of us are engineers that are not scared to push buttons, but it seems we all have a slightly different way to handle things. I have no previous experience with this type of equipment and am slowly figuring out better ways to set things up. Last weekend they guy running the board had a microphone so "hot" trying to pick up a flute and violin that were standing back from it that I could almost see the glo around it. I was just waiting for the horrible reverb screech to happen. I was on this week and was very careful to bring the house volume up a little more than normal in an effort to minimize the gain on the various microphones.

Does anyone have any general tips and/or recommendation on how to maximize the sound quality. The equipment is adequate, but I'd love to upgrade it a notch or two if the funds were available. I may have to donate some microphone cords just to have a matching set.

Considering the audio equipment that I own personally, I figured it would be horribly selfish for me to not join the AV team since they can always use another person in the rotation.
mceljo

Showing 3 responses by mceljo

mceljo OP
1,357 posts
 
Driver - Sounds like your church is far more advanced than mine. For giggles, here's the list of the main equipment that we have:

MIDAS Venice 240 (soundboard)
Alesis MidiVerb 4 (processor)
EV Dx38 (processor)
Europower EP2500 (stereo amplifiers x2, 1200 wpc)
University Sound Model 9006 (amplifier x1, 60 wpc)
EV main speakers (unknown model)

I have no idea about the microphone specifics other than we have two new wireless Sennheiser's. The cables that we have are a mixed batch, but all seem to work fine.

The only big issue that I know of is that there is one cable in the setup that needs to be replaced as it causes some background noise from time to time as the connection gets bumped. I don't think anyone knows exactly which cable is causing the problem, but I think we can narrow it down to at least one piece of equipment. I had do so some wiggling this past weekend to get things to quiet down, but had to do it with the system off since people were using the space at the time and I didn't want to annoy them.

Let me know what you think of the equipment. I'm sure it was purchased with the best of intentions by people without any real knowledge about the equipment and a goal of minimizing cost.
mceljo OP
1,357 posts
 
That's a lot of great information to keep in mind. Thanks for the feedback on the equipment.

For clarification, a normal AV setup at my church involves four microphones for singers and sometimes one or two guitars plugged into the system. It's really a simply setup most of the time, but I still want to learn as much as I can to makes sure I maximize what I can with what we have.

On of the most difficult things to figure out is the right level on the monitors since they can't be heard from the soundboard. We had one event where it got turned up to the point of overpowering the main speakers and it took a minute to figure out where the sound was coming from.
mceljo OP
1,357 posts
 
I purchased some microphone cables from monoprice.com and they arrived last night. I got home extremely late so I only had time to cut the packaging and get them ready to deliver to the church tonight (was going for a practice anyways). They appear to have solid construction and are very flexible. The outer surface is an interesting material that I can't identify. I can understand the reviews about flexibility and one "compliant" that they collected fuzz when laying on carpet. It'll be nice to have a matching set of cords so that I don't have to sort through the misc. stack on a regular basis.
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