Need help getting sound monitors to mirror the house.
- Thread starterAndrew738
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IMHO, mixing in a booth is a foolish thing to attempt. You'll get the best results by moving the mixer into the house. At best, the monitor speakers will be an approximation. Even if they match in loudness and frequency response, the acoustic environment will be completely different. It will be devoid of room reverberation, direct sound from instruments, noise from the audience, HVAC noise, etc., that all affect what you hear and how you mix. I'd rather get a poke in the eye than mix in a booth.
Can you take a picture of your booth? I'm having trouble visualizing the arrangement.
Those monitors you've got are pretty fancy as far as active speakers go, I'll take a stab in the dark and guess that by frequency you mean equalization (adjusting the high, middle, low (and everything in between) frequencies to the sound. Depending on what output is feeding those monitors from your Soundcraft- If it's the same source as your main speakers or another output, can also impact the quality (and quantity) of sound.
I would google Alesis ProLinear 720 DSP and find a manual for your speakers. A cursory search turned up that there are a bunch of preset EQ settings and I'm betting one of your booth mates changed to a different one. The other possibility lies with everything between your monitor and the actual sound source. We need to know how your mains connect to the Soundcraft and how the monitors connect. The monitors will take a line level input, meaning that they amplify the sound on their own. Some house speakers will do this, but it's far more likely that there's an amplifier somewhere in between.
Also, like many have said, this is going to be very subjective. You physically cannot reproduce how your main speaker array will sound inside your control booth. You can get close (hence the subjectivity), but 100% accuracy in sound reproduction is just not possible. That being said, I think if you investigate the settings on your monitors and examine how each audio chain is getting it's signal you might find your culprit.
Keep in mind, your mains will have an amplifier somewhere between the console and the speakers and potentially an equalizer or a separate, external DSP of their own. Trace the cables back to the console and tell us where everything plugs in.
Those monitors you've got are pretty fancy as far as active speakers go, I'll take a stab in the dark and guess that by frequency you mean equalization (adjusting the high, middle, low (and everything in between) frequencies to the sound. Depending on what output is feeding those monitors from your Soundcraft- If it's the same source as your main speakers or another output, can also impact the quality (and quantity) of sound.
I would google Alesis ProLinear 720 DSP and find a manual for your speakers. A cursory search turned up that there are a bunch of preset EQ settings and I'm betting one of your booth mates changed to a different one. The other possibility lies with everything between your monitor and the actual sound source. We need to know how your mains connect to the Soundcraft and how the monitors connect. The monitors will take a line level input, meaning that they amplify the sound on their own. Some house speakers will do this, but it's far more likely that there's an amplifier somewhere in between.
Also, like many have said, this is going to be very subjective. You physically cannot reproduce how your main speaker array will sound inside your control booth. You can get close (hence the subjectivity), but 100% accuracy in sound reproduction is just not possible. That being said, I think if you investigate the settings on your monitors and examine how each audio chain is getting it's signal you might find your culprit.
Keep in mind, your mains will have an amplifier somewhere between the console and the speakers and potentially an equalizer or a separate, external DSP of their own. Trace the cables back to the console and tell us where everything plugs in.
This is the sound setup we have. The objects on top of the monitors are Shure directional antennas.
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Jay Ashworth
Well-Known Member
Is that an opening, or a window?
This the full booth the middle part is a sliding window.
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Jay Ashworth
Well-Known Member
Does it slide all the way out of the opening, or is it at best half-open?
JD
Well-Known Member
The best bet is to get a good set of mics located in the general listening area and feed them through their own mix to the monitors in the booth. Often, the mix coming through the system is not the full sound image. In some cases, it is almost a negative image in that it is filling in some things on the stage that are not carrying on their own. About the only time you want to listen to a straight board mix is when you are recording. Live sound is always about balancing the house. In a sealed or limited booth, you want to somehow hear what people are hearing.
Eboy87
Well-Known Member
If you have a good DSP, you could feed a matrix send of the main mix to it, and adjust the EQ so it sounds like your system, but that takes stage volume out of the equation. Is moving the console to the window opening an option? I would strongly advocate for relocating the console to the open window, or out in the house as needed. Beyond that, frequent trips out to the house while someone babysits the desk is also a very good solution. A good mixer will learn the difference in sound quality between the house and mix position, though that point is a bit more difficult in a high school setting.
Do to architectural reasons relocating isn't really an option as much as we would like to. How exactly would we set up a matrix to do that? I know it's not the prefered or the best method.
It all comes down to control. Ideally, you would tune your room the exact same that you tune your monitors. What @Eboy87 is talking about is getting a sound processor that could change the sound going to the monitors to match as close as possible to what is coming out of your house PA. You would send the exact same signal you are sending to your main speakers to the processor. You could feed that processor with a matrix feed of your L/R bus.
That is the easy part. You would then have to take measurements of the house PA and use those measurements to get the exact same frequency response out of your monitors.
What I just detailed involves at least a 2,000 dollar processor and a few grand in measurement equiptment. All things you don't have.
My advice... Patch your monitors into an open matrix and send L to Left and Right to R. Get a piece of music that you know well that has a lot of lows, mids, and highs. Listen to in the theatre. Walk up to the booth and listen to it. Fiddle with whatever knobs are on the monitors until it sounds close in frequency response (lows, mids, highs) and magnitude (how loud it is). Do that back and forth for a few hours until you get it as close as you can. If you have a spare graphic or paremetric EQ patch that in between the monitors and the console and fiddle with those knobs until it sounds even closer. Walk away at that point and try to figure out a way of getting the console in the house.
Eboy87
Well-Known Member
^ This ^
x1000.
Learning how the room sounds compared to mix position is actually much easier and intuitive than people might think, and it will sound so much better than trying to mix off of monitors processed to hell. The only other piece of advice I would give is don't use MP3s for this. CDs are fine, WAV and Apple Lossless files on an iPod are fine, but please, no MP3.
That setup doesn't look awful actually. You're not going to hear nearly as well as you would in the house, but I think you might be surprised to find what you can hear without the monitors going.
There are worse in this world. A high school near where I used to live was built, brand new, top of the line everything and it had a nice big, wide band hall built for it. Actually had JBL line arrays if I recall. The booth itself was at audience level (good) in an isolation room (uh oh), behind a plate glass window (crap), with no opening ($#%&*), and only an AC suction vent (
). All of the amps (QSC I think...) in that room overheated constantly and would shut down intermittently throughout performances. The door to the booth opened into the lobby so it was not useful to leave open during a performance.
There are worse in this world. A high school near where I used to live was built, brand new, top of the line everything and it had a nice big, wide band hall built for it. Actually had JBL line arrays if I recall. The booth itself was at audience level (good) in an isolation room (uh oh), behind a plate glass window (crap), with no opening ($#%&*), and only an AC suction vent (
). All of the amps (QSC I think...) in that room overheated constantly and would shut down intermittently throughout performances. The door to the booth opened into the lobby so it was not useful to leave open during a performance.Okay thank you for the help I will have the sound department give that a try. I will also have them give Footer's suggestion a try to see what they want to go with. Thanks again to everyone.That setup doesn't look awful actually. You're not going to hear nearly as well as you would in the house, but I think you might be surprised to find what you can hear without the monitors going.
There are worse in this world. A high school near where I used to live was built, brand new, top of the line everything and it had a nice big, wide band hall built for it. Actually had JBL line arrays if I recall. The booth itself was at audience level (good) in an isolation room (uh oh), behind a plate glass window (crap), with no opening ($#%&*), and only an AC suction vent (
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TimmyP1955
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