Exif data

Must remember to remove the exif data, or change it in some of the photos I give to people. This is because Facebook seems to want to automatically use the copyright in the description and so my web address is being published.
Not that this is a bad thing... more that it has caught me unawares and it currently points here... so you can see that I'm a little out of date!
Maybe this is a kick I need to get this blog running again?
Lets see...

Blimey.. not again!

Sorry, not neglecting you. Just I've been boring myself recently and didn't want to inflict it on you.
Interesting post coming up over the weekend.. promise! :o)

RCF ART 322A attention

You remember this post where I found out where the awful smell and not a lot of noise was coming from? Well the spare parts eventually came (note to self, try to avoid Italian kit.. getting burned too often by it!).
So here I thought, just gotta pop this in and away we go again. Erm, no.
Well the new driver went in well enough, unfortunately when hooked up to a signal not a lot came out. Bugger!
Here I was in two minds. This came from the perceived closed boxed'ness of an active speaker - you'd think it was more complicated than an outboard amp for some reason?
On the one hand I just wanted to pass the problem on to someone else.
And on the other there was no way I wanted to pay SLX to just look at it for £70 to find that it was an easy fix or totally knackered.
Naturally I got my screwdriver out. This is what I saw and did:

RCF ART 322A - Backplate

 1. Just take out the slightly larger screws from the backplate housing

2. Prise the guts out and lay somewhere handy and then unscrew the little screws from the zinc plated covering that goes around 3 sides. Remove this cover leaving the back plate, centre electronics, an end support and heat sink.

RCF ART 322A - amp hanging out

RCF ART 322A - not a lot to see here!

3. Now, there aren't many 'user serviceable parts' inside here but there are quite obviously two fuses!



I took a look at these... hummmm there appears to be an airgap inside them. Sweet, could this be it?

RCF ART 322A - see the fuses? They are it for user serviceable.

4. So pop em out and wander round to the stores to get replacements... F4A... knickers, everything but... ok then Maplin next... Ah, everything but. Ho humm. Fine, CPC for next day, everything but too... blimey these fuses are weirdly rare?
Ah, of cause, Italian... they wouldn't consider it good design if you could order parts easily!! Anyway... RS came up with the goods.
£1.17 for 10 fuses inc postage... Awesome. They came today.. got stuffed straight in... and... Woop... firing on both drivers again :)

I'm glad I at least looked at - let alone fixed this speaker as when you have little bits of knowledge like this in your arsenal you can really save someones day, not to mention wallet! :)

Mind: I was still flabbergasted at how little there was inside the amp considering it is a 450+W amp. Goes to show how much of a general purpose amp is wasted because it has to cover a lot of uses.

There is this game we play...

And hopefully he will be man enough to admit that he looked at this page and so I will have passed it on in a much more interesting way than that in which I came by being IT for a while.

Oh, and I promise I'll post properly again soon... got some nice pics of the inside of an RCF ART speaker coming up next, if I fix it!

Yesterday's Trouble!

Wilo Pumps in the DC plant room

So yesterday morning I was woken up by a phone call from Dance City's AD with email server problems. We tried sorting it over the VPN but in the end a local hard reset was what was required.
But I couldn't avoid coming in as he also informed me that the plant had shut down due to a leak and so there was no heat... worse still was that the janitor was about to have a go fixing it!!
I arrived to find leaks from the 3 of the 4 sets of Wilo  pumps you can see, but with most water coming from an expansion joint. I isolated this, the on call engineer from Integral fixed it later.
I spend more time in this room than I feel I want to... and why does the plant always break down when the operations manager is away.

Gel/colour/filter...

Call it what you want - I just know I detest sorting it.

DC Crossover store

So it is certainly a job I hate... and it's what probably makes me miss my assistants the most. No matter how hard I try, the store where it's all kept always looks like a bomb has gone off in it when I'm left to my own devices.

On the upside: I have found a load of colours I had no idea we had
On the downside: no idea where I just filed them! :/

So, that's where the burning smell was coming from!

RCF Art 322A bass driver - burned out!

Andy pointed out to me that there was a problem with one of our monitors at DC, an RCF Art 322A.
My ears had been blocked up with a cold so I wouldn't have been able to tell... but I had noticed the smell... just hadn't thought about it!

Here is what I found inside the cabinet! Oh well... only £189 +vat and delivery for a replacement!!!

Anyone knows who makes these drivers, I'd be happy with an OEM if it were half the price.

Next consideration is to put some limiting on the system it's used in... I've been trusting the users not to overdrive the speakers... 1st mistake!! ;)

More Blood, Sweat and Tears

Last week I was down in Huddersfield for the day and a gig to help with and then watch "Blood, Sweat and Tears" by BalletLorent at the Lawrence Batley Theatre. They've no crew available to op the show at Bridlington so I was there to learn it for this one off!
At DC we have a Congo Jr... BL have just bought a ETC ION... they are not even remotely similar :/ I've notes from watching Matt operate the Ion but they have been slow to sink in. As a refresher I thought I'd install the EOS software on my PC.. when I noticed that it'd work in OS X, sweet... that would be much preferable.
Here's the top of the show:

ETC Ion screen shot

All of a sudden I'm less afraid as the operating system won't be so alien now and my notes make sense again! :)

With a bit of luck - actually - I'd be really unlucky if it works out to be otherwise... I'll just have to patch, refocus the movers, check haze and and then run the show :)

Hopefully there will be a post in early march saying all was fine?!

Computer Hardware Chart

Spotted this on Geekologie, then followed it to the original creator Sonic84. There were interesting things to see on the way.

I've posted it here so I know where to find it... as I reckon it'll be useful tomorrow when I finally stick my head back inside the ailing PCs at DC again.

Darlington Arts Centre

Well I've seen that much has been made of "Save Darlington Arts Centre" of late...

They haven't exactly convinced me that they are that deserving.

Ok so they have quite a few moms and kids moving through the place doing 'Music with Mum' or something like... which in it's self is a bit weird, if you are a Dad does that mean you can't come. The title is what's it's judged on.. I'm a Dad by the way of course!

Today I was there in the Theatre Space with Appetite Dance Productions and company...

Darlington Arts Centre

So, they knew that there weren't many tickets sold... and I suspect that is why we were given fairly second rate service. The techs kept disappearing, the dance floor was poorly laid and cleaned.. and no one, and I mean NO ONE from the venue had the least bit of interest in what the company was presenting.

So now, and I'm sorry DAC... but you must try harder, I'm not that bothered about saving you right now, if you are not interested in me then I am not interested in you either and I think that's fair!

Today I shall mostly be measuring the deflection of my LX bars

Some kit I shall be using:

In the end it was well worth doing... I think I have made a mod to the truss that will allow the engineer to give me a lot more flexibility on loading? :)

Chinese New Year

This year the Chinese Students and Scholars Association chose to host their New Year Garden Party in Dance City... Good choice as outside it's been tipping down with rain all day. 
Here is the dressing-up room (Studio 5):

These guys consisted of some of the nicest and most helpful new people I have met in a while.
They pulled in a good crowd over the course of the day and the kids had fun :o)

Odd...

But I feel like I'm not allowed to dislike work that is presented in the Lab.
I like the choreographer, the dancers, the costume, the music... just not the piece as a whole. In my eyes it failed.
I got no narrative from much of it... I enjoyed watching the dancing - but just didn't really get it.
This isn't to say that no one liked it, or understood it.

Just waiting...

This is how I left the Dance Lab tonight (apparently I shouldn't be calling it by this name any more... it should be just "The Theatre", but whatever)...

I couldn't help but think that it looked like it was between jobs, just waiting...

there are many ways to die...

And this is just one of them.
I found this plugged in to the wall of my theatre. The adapter is fine, shuttered with earths etc. The way the Chinese 2 prong to 5A, fig8 IEC fits isn't good at all... especially as there were two little children in the theatre with the company that day with fingers just the right size to die!

The owner got a free 13A to Fig 8 IEC and a threat that if anything similar is plugged in in my theatre again then she should very quickly unplug it and leave with it never to return.

House

I've been helping an artist, Liz Connor, to create and publish footage from a site specific performance piece that she and her colleagues did a while back.
Here is the vid... I'd have quite liked to have attended the performance as it looks quite interesting.

http://liz-dancearts.tumblr.com/

MEWW really do seem to have disappeared! :/

Website not there

Phone not available

No resellers

Oh well...

It's a shame then that we have problems with loads of these... on top of the lights from yesterday.

The switched 240v pass through on the controller doesn't pass 240v through! Not much use then really, although it does run the EM light mode still... so no rush to fix it.

Another post from the glamourous life of a technical manager!?!

So not a lot going on this week with tech in the theatre... But this doesn't mean that there isn't tonnes of other stuff to sort out... I was just passing my Operations Manager's office when I got pulled into this little gem!

Here we have a non-maintained EM light with switched normal light. Didn't seem to be anything wrong with the supplies, 240v on all rails... it just doesn't come on under normal use... but still comes on in an emergency.
Well lets just replace the control gear then.. ah.. MEWW seem to have dropped out of existence online! Shame that the fitting is designed to fit around this gear then!! Ho humm!

My 1st ever go at a promo video

Client seemed happy with it.

www.zendeh.com

Hopefully any others will be shorter?

Some lessons learned in the making of this:

• film the media yourself
• question wether it really needs to be filmed in HD
• don't delete the master files until you are really, really, really sure the job is finished

A little bit of lighting...

That I threw together for ITV to film Appetite's rehearsal for their upcoming show in:

It must be getting on for a couple of months since I last touched the Congo?!

What could be simpler...

...than a big ol' box truss system with some lx bars hung on it?

On first sight it looks simple, and the load ratings look simple as supplied by the engineer. But this system is a complicated system, it can take a lot more that this implies. Calcs are based on simple suspension, there is no simple suspension anywhere on this truss.

Unfortunately Litec, the manufacturer of the truss really couldn't care less about helping the end user, so we are left to try to make the most out of what we have according to the specs they provide.

Henry

Sometimes it's the most domestic things that make me happy.
I've finally been allowed to buy my own vacuum cleaner for the theatre... I went for the obvious and traditional choice: A bright red Henry by Numatic :)