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multitracking and foh all in one?


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Any of you live studio audience specialists have some good advice for minimizing feedback off cos-11s when fed into house PA system? Would a program like the Daily Show be running feedback eliminators and other special gear to allow more amplification? Sorry if this has been discussed ad naseum on this forum - I couldn't find any record...

 

Thanks!

S

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Most shows of that nature (studio) use distributed systems (as opposed to a typical point source PA) with multiple speakers either under the seats or hung directly above the crowd.

 

The benefit being that you don't need as much volume for the audience to be able to hear, consequently there's less chance of spillover into the lav mics on stage.

 

If you have to use a standard flown/stacked PA, a 31 band or good parametric EQ is your friend.

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Even with the best rung out room and the best feedback suppressors, in a room with hung speakers you will need to

1 be very careful with speaker placement

2 be very careful with audio levels.

You will not be able to blast the speakers through the room without hitting feedback.

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Feedback killers are your friends in these situations...--dbx now has theirs integrated into some of their other devices, like EQ's and CL's...

BTW, not only are the speakers spread out close to the audience thus running at lower volumes, but the audience is kept a bit away from the sets (via aisles for the cameras and stuff)...

 

the trick is minimizing the speakers getting into the audience mic's...

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...the trick is minimizing the speakers getting into the audience mic's...

 

Because actress Bonnie Franklin of One Day at a Time died a week or so ago, all the networks were playing lots of clips from that 1970s sitcom, and I happened to listen to a few of them. It was appalling how much of the audience speakers were getting into the audience mics... not quite feedback, but it was definitely a lot of echoey, boomy, phasey stuff going on. It's incredible what was accepted as "normal" 30+ years ago, and how relatively good things sound today. 

 

I assume that shotgun mics for audience reactions are more standardized now, and speaker placement is a lot more critical, with lots of tests and stuff. I can vividly recall being on stages when sitcoms were shot, and the producers yelling at the poor sound man in charge of FOH mixes to crank up the actors dialogue "because the audience is not laughing enough!" They couldn't accept that maybe speaker level wasn't at fault.

 

As to the o.p.'s question: I think if this is a live interview situation, then an automixer might help duck the levels of unused mics to minimize the potential for feedback. That plus careful level adjustment, feedback eliminators, careful speaker placement, and good acoustics could help a lot. 

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I can vividly recall being on stages when sitcoms were shot, and the producers yelling at the poor sound man in charge of FOH mixes to crank up the actors dialogue "because the audience is not laughing enough!" They couldn't accept that maybe speaker level wasn't at fault.

 

Now imagine replicating this exact situation in a theatre show as one of its scene that's part of the story.  It's like a PA within a PA.

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" I assume that shotgun mics for audience reactions are more standardized now, "

not really... not typically shotguns, either.

 

What are they using for audience mics these days on sitcoms? When I worked on Anything But Love in 1990-1991, that was definitely the audience mic they were using up in the lighting grid at Fox. That might have also been around the time when stereo audience mics started taking over, certainly by the time DA88 took over for sitcom sound around 1994-1995 or so. 

 

I suspect this may be a studio-by-studio thing -- I can certainly recall different stages booming the actors from above the grid, vs. having a floor-rolling Fisher boom. 

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