EQ Woes

The last few gigs where we've used our own sound equipment, we've had more feedback problems in the front monitors than we used to have in the past. I was blaming it on the new monitors John got, some QSC K10s, which have 500W for the woofer and 500W for the tweeter, which kinda seems like overkill for the tweeter. We've turned to mechanical equalization on Emily's monitor the past couple gigs; tape a towel over the tweeter. Instant squeal–b–gone!

Turns out that our new board is the problem. Allen & Heath decided that for this line of boards, they'd put the aux sends after the EQ, meaning that when the engineer adjusts the EQ so it sounds right in the mains, it also changes the way it sounds in the monitors. More times than not, high end is added to vocals to crisp them up, and high end in vocal monitors is a giant no–no, because it just goes right back into the mic.

The other A&H models (like the one we had before) use the correct design, which feeds the un–EQd signal to the auxes, and even include internal jumpers that one can switch if they're not using the auxes for monitors and really do want an EQd signal sent to them. But the Zed line does not have jumpers. Arg. Their stuff is so genius and well built that I can't understand why they made such a bonehead decision about this.

Short of trading in this barely used board for something that has the exact same features and channels for one that wires the auxes the right way, we need to get EQs for the monitors. So we'll need 4 of them. Amazingly, Alesis makes this really cool 1–rack space 8–channel 30–band digital EQ. It has 100 presets, so we could even have custom setups with minor tweaks for every bar. And everybody can have their own monitor sound the way they want. Woohoo!