Year of the System: Surgery
Here’s a brief taste of how my week started. I’ll save the details on how and why for another time, but this week we are replacing all the drivers and crossovers in our mains. Today was speaker surgery day, and it turned out to be a project far beyond anything we ever imagined. All day and night we poured sweat and shed blood trying to take these things apart and replace the components. Thankfully we got everything back together tonight before they could lock us out of the building, but we never could have done it without all the help we got from our rockin’ volunteer reinforcements who came in last minute to give us a hand.
Tomorrow the boxes go back in the air, and I’ll spend the rest of the week re-tuning the entire rig. I’ll have more as the story unfolds….
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What kind of boxes are these? Meyer?
Renkus Heinz Trap 42’s.
How many torn speakers did you have I wonder? What sound levels do you usually reproduce on a given Sunday morning?
soooo… How was your week fixing and re-tuning the system?
How often do you go through your boxes like this? Do you do this when it’s needed or is it a regularly scheduled thing?
That sort of work takes a really long time. I especially love on the RH cabinets how the cork dries out, and you have to really push on the input panels to get them to pop out.
PS You wouldn’t happen to have a couple of spare RH C2 Sub input plates (with speakon) would ya? 🙂
Sorry, Phil, but I don’t have any.
A post on the whole week is in the works, but it’s taking some time because I really needed to get away from the whole thing. It was not a fun week in spite of the results which were satisfactory for me. They passed the “staff” test, but failed the “wife” test; staff could hear a difference, my wife could not and she has the real world/average listener perspective.
Bradley, as far as how often we go through the boxes like that, it’s really an as needed thing. I try and walk the room on a weekly basis, but that doesn’t always happen; sometimes I just have to settle for checking everything at FOH. But there are still enough of us on staff and volunteers on our team walking through the rooms often enough that if we someone hears something odd it gets checked during the week.
The work we did has been needed for at least the last two years, and we finally did it last week. At the end of the day, loudspeakers are still moving parts. Sometimes they wear out and lose performance quality, then sometimes they just sort of crap out, and sometimes it’s something in between which in a way can be worse. Our system has been worn out for a long time, but we’ve made it work; some of the guys have started calling me “the Doctor” for everything I’ve done to that rig to keep it alive for the last couple years. But at any rate, I feel OK saying it is in much better health now than it has been in 2 years. It still needs some tweaking, but it’s on the road to recovery. I’ll have more probably later this week…
Wow, looks like a busy project…with a possible fun challenge to it?
Good-luck Dave.