7.18.2006

Bringing up the Standard

Maybe I should have titled this post "If it acts like trash, it's going to find itself there." That's become sort of my mantra for a lot of the low cost stuff that's been failing recently at church.

Victim No. 1 is a CD player (we use the line out of a portable kind for space and costs reasons -- I really want to upgrade) that acted okay, but sort of buggy, in soundcheck, then decided to not allow me to skip to the appropriate track when a guest wanted to sing along during service (our musicians knew the song, and she was forgiving, thankfully).

Soon to follow are those wireless mics I've been griping about. But the story gets better. A guest speaker wanted to use a lav mic, which had been used before but not in our present location -- just across the highway from a major television tower. So I began testing it, and, by moving it around, was able to "tune in" different channels as if I were sitting in my car. We didn't use it.

The handheld wireless which we had been using acted up as usual. I played with the squelch knob, and found that if I tried to get it anywhere near it's factory setting (fully counter-clockwise), it too became an open radio receiver. I'm closing in on a replacement, with my eye currently on the
Audio-Technica 2100 series mics. I wonder if I can get one receiver, a handheld, and a lav, setting it up so I can use either one based on the speakers preferences. I see some lower priced alternatives, but I'm kind of worried about plowing money into those test cases that may fail, not to mention they don't have the flexibility of the A-T. I have not finished my search though. I'm hoping to get something of the price/feature balance that the 2100 series has.

By the way, you can get all the information you need to know and then some about wireless mic system setup and operation from a guide distributed in .pdf by
Lectrosonics. If I have to make a case for replacing the wireless systems we already have beyond what has already happened, I'm going to e-mail the file to all concerned and start citing page references.

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