Originally Posted By: Guitarhacker
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One writer's opinion is hardly a consensus or an industry standard. In all my years in live music and playing with professional bands and artists, I have never come across any FOH engineers who use anything other than studio recorded mixes when they are playing background music.
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+1

And in some instances, not just for "background" music as well.

The real issue is to "know your monitors" so that you can mix and master on them with the full knowledge that the end result will "translate" to many different playback situations.

On top of that is the fact that there are so many differing PA systems in use, with nearly an infinite number of possible pieces of componentry, settings, speakers or speaker types, all of this coupled with how the user thinks they should run the thing, which may or may not be in conformance with the known and scientific application of such, well, it soon becomes a crapshoot.

If the system in question has never been subjected to Realtime Analysis along with the necessary steps needed to correct response, which may vary from venue to venue, if the operator of the system does not have a very good handle on use of Fletcher-Munson response curve usage as involves system amplitude levels, if the operator has not taken steps to measure and correct Time Alignment, they likely have no choice but to use that system to tweak their backing tracks to their liking.

They only have to take their audience's response into consideration at that point.

Or at least, they should.

I remember a situation in which we recorded the performance Live "off the board" - prefader! - into multitracks on the DAW.

Next day, before the second performance, I played it back as multichannel Line Inputs through the very same system - and the guy who managed the band wanted to start tweaking the board.

It sounded pretty much exactly like it sounded during the live performance the night before, though, with which he was very happy.

He thought it didn't.

Perceptions, not the reality, can be perhaps the biggest hurdle here.



--Mac

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