Live Sound Reference Guide for Beginners
For The Beginning Audio Technician
Being an audio technician is a difficult field of study and an even harder profession for a beginner. Although, there are many avenues in audio that one can take dealing with live sound and recording. If you are new to audio, it's a good idea to check out all sections in this guide along with the rest of this website. All the sections of this guide show equipment used, setups, situations, and where they are used. This will also give you an idea where to seek opportunities once you've gotten more than some of the basics. This section will focus on more advanced topics, such as, special routing, connecting outboard equipment to mixers or dealing with digital mixers. These advance topics will cover more common situations involving simpler, budget, setups to more, expensive, extensive setups. This section will be continuously updated showing new equipment and why you should learn how to use it or even purchase it.
Separate Subwoofer Channel
In this topic, we will explain how having a separate output channel for your subwoofers can help you and how to set it up.
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Having a dedicated subwoofer output channel out of your mixer will help clean up what is going to your subs. In doing so, the overall sound will be much cleaner and tighter. So what do you send to your subs? Instruments such as kick drums and bass guitars would be a good start. This keeps other instruments that don't play in the lower frequencies out of the subs, increasing the subs efficiency.
In the following illustration, a very simplified diagram shows the connection of the tops and subs. This is assuming that the speakers have built-in amplification. If your using amplifiers, the setup would be similar except for the connections going to your amplifier or whatever processing equipment you have before speakers. The signal going to the subs is mono and is sent to the first sub and then split there to the next sub. Most powered subs have outputs to connect additional subs or to connect the tops. Some have a built in crossover button that will put a high-pass filter on that output. You want to make sure that crossover is off on this setup.
Analog Mixers
Setting this up with analog mixer is a little tricky depending on your mixer. If you have a mixer with plenty of sends, you can just send a signal much the same way as you would a signal to your monitor. You want to make sure this send is set to post or is connected to a post fader send. This will allow the sub signal to change with the level of the channel. If your lucky and your mixer has subgroups, you can send that kick drum and bass to the subgroup and connect your sub output to the output of the subgroup. Make sure that those subgroups are not being routed to the main output. This will increase the level of those instruments going to the main output.
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Video example coming soon....
Digital Mixer
Setting this up with a digital mixer is very simple and much more configurable. You basically send the signal much like a monitor mix but setting that mix to be a post fader mix. This will allow the sub signal to change with the level of the channel.
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Video example coming soon....