Has anybody come across this before?

[digitalscream]

I was talking with somebody earlier who reminded me of what happened at a gig in Nottingham last year. We were soundchecking with the grumpiest, most un-cooperative sound guy in existence, and we were really having trouble hearing any detail from the monitors, and everything sounded crap from the PA - just no treble at all.

On further inspection, there weren't any tweeters in the monitors (ie they'd been removed), and the tweeters in the PA cabs had been disconnected. I queried this with Mr Grumpy, and his response was...

"I got sick and f*cking tired of idiot singers pointing their mics at the monitors and blowing the tweeters with feedback, so I got rid of them. It's their own fault, so just live with it."

I was pretty much dumbfounded. Of course, I asked him if he'd also removed the crossovers from the signal path, which got me a blank look (and explained why it all sounded so shit) followed by the kind of look which says "stop interfering, or I'll wreck your sound even more than my PA will".

Anybody else encountered that sort of approach to PA construction?

[koneguitarist]

No because I would not stand for it.
If I know a PA is provided for a gig I check who he is and what the PA is before I take the gig.

[Danny1969]

I've seen some really bad PA's at venues, a lot of home made bins and horns, racks full of Behringer kit and yeah, monitors with no horns. In the ninesties I was with a band that had a huge H&H PA that consisted of 2 bins per side, 2 mids per side and no horns. Nothing above around 5K came out of the system yet we did thousands of gigs with it.

I've only done about 4 gigs over the last 8 years where we didn't use our own PA and own engineer. And even for those gigs I've plumbed in our IEM rack. If your not doing enough gigs to warrant buying a PA it might still be worth getting your own IEM's. Most venue engineers should be happy to feed you an aux send

[maltingsaudio]

I do have a certain amount of sympathy with the engineer's plight, if its his kit and its costing him more in damage each night than the hire fee due to bands being stupid or inexperienced.

Ever tried extracting some money from a band member who has deliberately or accidentally damaged or your gear?

[digitalscream]

I've only done about 4 gigs over the last 8 years where we didn't use our own PA and own engineer. And even for those gigs I've plumbed in our IEM rack. If your not doing enough gigs to warrant buying a PA it might still be worth getting your own IEM's. Most venue engineers should be happy to feed you an aux send

Yeah...we usually take our own sound engineer and monitors with us when we're the only band on the bill, but we do quite a few gigs where we're main support out of 3 or 4 bands and it turns into quite a pain trying to persuade the venue engineer to let us plug our gear in.

I do have a certain amount of sympathy with the engineer's plight, if its his kit and its costing him more in damage each night than the hire fee due to bands being stupid or inexperienced.

Ever tried extracting some money from a band member who has deliberately or accidentally damaged or your gear?

Well, insurance should cover it. And besides, I've never seen such a thing happen to cabs at any venue. In fact, the only thing I can think of which would have allowed that to happen is if the power amps were capable of putting out far more power than the cabs could handle and not limited in anyway.

The other point is that the PA at this particular venue was literally falling apart. Example: the socket panel on the back of two of the cabs was literally hanging out the back of the cabinet. I can't imagine that this guy had actually spent anything on it in the last 20 years.