Ringing The Room For Karaoke
Nobody wants to have tons of feedback in their karaoke DJ equipment. You won’t find a magic bullet for feedback, because the possibility of it exists any time you have a speaker, mic, and amplifier. Whenever unwanted noise goes looping through your equipment at a particular frequency that’s feedback. Feedback is especially typical in karaoke systems because you find more omnidirectional mics and KJs typically have to play fast and loose with microphone gain sliders.
In a perfect world, all feedback problems could be resolved with ideal sound component placement. Reality intrudes though and a karaoke DJ has to adjust for all kinds of migraine inducing acoustic variables. Handling standing waves, wooden flooring, and unusually shaped environments is just another day on the schedule. Still, who actually enjoys a perfect acoustic environment outside of a studio?
The simple answer to feedback is using an automatic pinking unit like the dbx DriveRack PA and a calibration microphone. The DriveRack is hands off and versatile and replaces the graphic equalizer, feedback destroyer, crossover, and limiter in you KJ equipment and only needs a tiny rack slot. Bad news, the six hundred dollar price may set you back a bit.
If the dbx DriveRack is too rich for your bank account right now, you can always ring the room to control feedback. Since you probably presently own a good graphic equalizer – thirty one band is ideal – you possess the equipment you use to ring the room already. It is a manual adjustment method you can do in just a few minutes, and it prevents feedback pretty well if you are prepared to adapt things a touch during your show for the acoustic variables added by the increase of bodies into the physical space.
Begin the procedure by putting your equipment in the best possible locations for preventing feedback. Make your speakers live, but set the master volume down and set every equalizer control to flat. Don’t forget to set any equalizer dials on the other equipment – like the VocoPro mixer or player – to their flat, too.
Turn on the main microphone and have an assistant start singing a peak-less sound check. Feedback will develop at a certain point as you slowly increase the overall gain, so proceed slowly. You should find that your specific equipment owns a peak frequency that is a recurring problem spot for you during a ring, and sometimes that’s the 1st shriek you’ll get.
Use your graphic equalizer and adjust the troublesome frequency. Can’t figure out what frequency is the culprit? Either use a spectrum analyzer or just fiddle with the equalizer sliders until you get a feel for it. Sometimes you can move a frequency band off to eliminate the feedback cycle and then slide it up again to a point slightly beneath the danger zone. You wouldn’t want to ruin the quality of your output from distortion through awful equalizer levels.
As you keep on turning up the volume you’ll find several problem frequencies to tune out. You might find that you have to move 6 or more equalizer controls to get the volume you need. You’ll arrive at a level where you either got a. lots of gain or b. several frequencies looping simultaneously or c. already adjusted frequencies shrieking again or d. loss of sound quality.
The last step is to make a feedback cushion by dialing back the just achieved gain by 8-12 dB. When you’ve done the ring carefully, you could produce up to ten or twelve decibel more. However when you have all the gain you need, you should stop ringing the room, since each equalizer band you adjust impacts the quality of your sound audibly. And don’t let any of your other gain levels in your machine karaoke system creep up higher than that primary volume level you have just rung out. You are on the way to minimizing equipment feedback for your upcoming karaoke night.
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Filed under: Arts and Entertainment