Hello everyone,
I am looking at purchasing a new soundboard for my high school theater program, but have a few problems, questions, and concerns before I do. Now I realize that there have been posts in the past about this, but many of them are years old and I wanted a fresh opinion.
First off, I am concerned that I don't have nearly enough training in the audio field to truly be making these purchasing decisions, which is I am posting here.
Second, I don’t really know exactly what I am trying to accomplish through this purchase, I just know that my director has decided that our sound quality isn’t up to par with her standards and I feel as though there is bound to be a board out there with the capabilities to fix many of these aspects.
So, to put everything into perspective.
We currently own a 36 channel analog board with no real bells and whistles. On average our productions run about 16-24 lavs, 3 hanging mics (which I cannot get to work well for the life of me) and typically a small band set up (two keyboards, one drum set, two or three guitars and the random trumpet or brass instrument). During our last show we added a small five channel side console to accommodate for the band and mixed is separately.
Our main problems (which I am hoping to solve through this purchase) were as follows:
The ability of the high school students to control all 24 microphones and the hanging mics all at the same time was daunting to say the very least. Even with two board ops and a que caller we still had lines that weren’t mic’d until half way through. I feel as though mute groups would fix this. I have heard that they are very similar to the cues found in our lighting boards.
Second, our actual sound queing system is a single dell computer with iTunes hooked up to the board. I know there has to be some better way to do this, and I don’t know why someone wouldn’t have integrated it into a digital board yet.
Third; though we have already spent a couple of thousand dollars to get compressors for about 8 of our microphones, having compression and gates on each of the microphones would be a tremendous help! I figure by the time we purchased enough to accommodate for the highly sporadic and unexpected actions of a high school actor / actress that we will have spent enough to buy ourselves a new board that could do it for us.
I don’t know if there is a high end analog that provides all of these capabilities, or if it is about time I moved into the digital board age. I have enough resources around my school in Colorado that I am sure I could find someone to offer myself and my students official training, I just need to figure out what sort of board to get! Though our maximum budget is about $17,000 I would really like to spend less than that. We still have a lot of microphones that need purchasing (as we have been renting at least 8 every show for the past two years), some new power and signal distributors, as well as some new hanging mics, seeing that our work very very poorly…
Though this could potentially be a whole different post! Does any want to fill me in as to what a “boundary” or “border” mic is? And does anyone have any good tips for proper placement of overhead mics for maximum efficiency (or simply suggestions for a good brand of a new over head mic.) We are having a lot of troubles getting good sound from our chorus even when our lav’s are working well!
Thanks for all your help!
I am looking at purchasing a new soundboard for my high school theater program, but have a few problems, questions, and concerns before I do. Now I realize that there have been posts in the past about this, but many of them are years old and I wanted a fresh opinion.
First off, I am concerned that I don't have nearly enough training in the audio field to truly be making these purchasing decisions, which is I am posting here.
Second, I don’t really know exactly what I am trying to accomplish through this purchase, I just know that my director has decided that our sound quality isn’t up to par with her standards and I feel as though there is bound to be a board out there with the capabilities to fix many of these aspects.
So, to put everything into perspective.
We currently own a 36 channel analog board with no real bells and whistles. On average our productions run about 16-24 lavs, 3 hanging mics (which I cannot get to work well for the life of me) and typically a small band set up (two keyboards, one drum set, two or three guitars and the random trumpet or brass instrument). During our last show we added a small five channel side console to accommodate for the band and mixed is separately.
Our main problems (which I am hoping to solve through this purchase) were as follows:
The ability of the high school students to control all 24 microphones and the hanging mics all at the same time was daunting to say the very least. Even with two board ops and a que caller we still had lines that weren’t mic’d until half way through. I feel as though mute groups would fix this. I have heard that they are very similar to the cues found in our lighting boards.
Second, our actual sound queing system is a single dell computer with iTunes hooked up to the board. I know there has to be some better way to do this, and I don’t know why someone wouldn’t have integrated it into a digital board yet.
Third; though we have already spent a couple of thousand dollars to get compressors for about 8 of our microphones, having compression and gates on each of the microphones would be a tremendous help! I figure by the time we purchased enough to accommodate for the highly sporadic and unexpected actions of a high school actor / actress that we will have spent enough to buy ourselves a new board that could do it for us.
I don’t know if there is a high end analog that provides all of these capabilities, or if it is about time I moved into the digital board age. I have enough resources around my school in Colorado that I am sure I could find someone to offer myself and my students official training, I just need to figure out what sort of board to get! Though our maximum budget is about $17,000 I would really like to spend less than that. We still have a lot of microphones that need purchasing (as we have been renting at least 8 every show for the past two years), some new power and signal distributors, as well as some new hanging mics, seeing that our work very very poorly…
Though this could potentially be a whole different post! Does any want to fill me in as to what a “boundary” or “border” mic is? And does anyone have any good tips for proper placement of overhead mics for maximum efficiency (or simply suggestions for a good brand of a new over head mic.) We are having a lot of troubles getting good sound from our chorus even when our lav’s are working well!
Thanks for all your help!