Tech Talk

Proof that everything’s bigger in Texas The VL4000 is a mawkish brute of a thing, weighing over 40kg and requiring a minimum of 52 DMX channels to control. The VL4000 uses a 1200W Philips MSR Gold lamp to achieve an output of 33,000 lumens in standard mode. ‘Standard’ mode sees the 1200W lamp run at…

Portable audio testing convenience Some people get oddly enthused by test equipment – typically they’re the kind of people who rely on such equipment to make their working days easier.  dBbox 2 from CTP Systems is a test device and it’s clearly been designed with audio professionals in mind. The dBbox 2 is a fairly…

When a song production leaves half its musical potential on the shelf, everyone gets disappointed. “If only they’d added X, Y and Z” people say… “the song would have been amazing!” Some musicians don’t have this problem, of course. They throw every conceivable overdub at a song, hoping something will stick… and sometimes things do……

Ever wondered why the real estate between your speakers gets so crowded so quickly? It’s not just because there are too many instruments jockeying for position. It’s because everyone is standing shoulder to shoulder at the front of the mix. Ever thought to let a few people stand back a bit? Whether you’re recording or…

Connecting the bits… We often take for granted how multiplexing has changed the way we do things.  Now instead of running lots of analogue audio multicore, we can run a data cable.  Instead of running lots of lighting control multicore, we can run a data cable.  Instead of running a bunch of video cabling, we…

Raising the bar for LED I ran an LED lighting demo early this year – it wasn’t a shootout because I had a number of very different types of fixtures.  The Mac Quantum Profile was one of them, and because it’s been quite a busy year, I’d forgotten just how much it impressed me at…

Margaret Court Arena, in Melbourne Park, started life in 1988 as an open air tennis court known as Show Court One.  Thanks to the $700 million Melbourne Park Masterplan, the outdoor court was bought inside with a retractable roof, just in time for the 2015 Australian Open, and renamed after the legendary Margaret Court, winner…

It took all of three minutes for the entire of the CX office to reach a consensus about the RUSH Gobo Projector 1, and the consensus is that we all think it’s great.  But why? I guess it’s important to understand the function of a gobo projector – most commonly they’re used for corporate branding. …

AVID’s new flagship live desk, the S6L, was so popular at PL+S that they had two of the new systems in a roped-off area that you needed an appointment to get in to. The decision-makers from the world’s biggest production companies were all in there through the show, pulling out their chequebooks and ordering what…

Something different We’re sort of at a point now where LED is not only a practical and viable lightsource, but it’s starting to become the accepted norm for many applications.  Robe got onto the LED bandwagon pretty early on and their product line has matured well over time as a result.  Only a few years…

A fantastic new channel strip arrived here at The Mill a couple of weeks ago – which I’ve been giving a damned good flogging ever since…  The Canadian made MA-PEQ is an all-discrete, transformer-less single channel mic preamp and passive program equaliser housed in a single rack unit. Combining a high quality, powerful sounding preamp…

Lightweight digital with heavyweight performance I’m rather taken with the M32R.  I wasn’t too sure initially what to expect from it, but I think it’s fair to say whatever expectations I had were certainly exceeded. M32R is essentially an M32 which is rack width and includes rack rails in the box.  I’m not sure why…