how to fight bass feedback/rumble
Frank
2,370 Posts
At my current venue, I'm djing on a wooden stage that houses two big subwoofers.I did everything possible to avoid the dreaded rumble or bass-feedback, even going as far as to build my own set-up which is a platform for turntables and mixer that is suspended on steel wires from the ceiling with a counterweight wire with pull spring attached to the stage.With some records, I still get the rumble though and I'm under the impression that the records themselves pick up bass volume from the air and they then start to vibrate or the needle does... I found out that brandnew needles make a difference and I'm now putting on fresh needles on my Whitelabels before every gig.Somehow I'm under the impression that rumble generally most often occures when playing the first track on an LP, 45s or tracks further towards the centre of an LP are much less affected. Of course those tracks that need some EQ boosting on the bass are most difficult.Any tips, suggestions, experiences?For the next gig I'm planning on cutting slipmatts out of mousepad material for extra insulation.thanx!Frank
Comments
This will cause you endless problems, and I doubt that any kind of physical
modifications will help you.
If you or the club is willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks, get
a Feedback Exterminator, put it in the signal chain after your mixer,
and that should do it. The FE will isolate the frequency and squash it.
Good luck.
but i'm pretty sure you're on 1200s there...if you could make sure you are as far away from the subwoofers as possible that could help...but it's tricky since low frequencies are omni-directional and they travel far and wide. if nothing else you may just have to have to play a game with the low freq eq knob on the mixer and have it cut just enough to prevent feedback.
when i've seen people dj in that room the set-up has been by the bar...maybe over there you would be better off since the stage houses the sub-woofers and no matter where you are on the stage the floor trasmitting those low freqs and they are travelling up the legs of the dj table and straight into the stylus and causing the feedback.
If you're too close, though, it might be hard to prevent.
If you make a thick slipmatt, make sure you raise the tonearm to compensate.
Forget it.
Nothing will stop the feedback enough to be effective
with every record he plays. Suspending the turntables
is a good start, but as he mentions, he still gets feedback,
and he will, as long as the needles are within 20 feet of the subs.
I have had this exact experience, and only a frequency filter
solved the problem, and I tried EVERYTHING else.
I bring my own 1200s and with the suspended "dj table" I'm save from any vibration traveling from the stage to the turntables. The bass definitely gets picked up from the air. The turntables also sit on a 3" thick layer of rubber foam. I'm using 2gr of tracking force and I can jump up and down behind the turntables without the needle skipping. Only connection from the platform to the stage is a steel wire with a pull spring, so the platform is save from vibrating. I've had two gigs there already and it's been working out alright, still not perfect and I might have to try one of those feedback eliminators.
I can't really move off the stage because the place gets totally crowded and I'd take up valuable room for paying customers and then people would also be bumping into shit... I don't think it'd be better to stand in front of the subwoofers instead of on top of them.
I think A****w made the most valuable suggestion with the supressor. Thanx for that! Anybody have any hands-on experience with certain models?
6 years ago and it cost me $400. It's pretty basic signal processing,
so just get the most basic one, no 8 channel at once bs.
The theatre I work at has a cheap-o Behringer, and it works just fine.
Dude would never.
I love the mental image of him testing out the system on the first day,
hearing the feedback and saying "Fuggit, I'ma gonna hang the
setup from the ceiling and custom install a counterwieght wire."
Next Level.
Buy a Sabine, Frank.
A perfectionist like yourself should have one anyway.
Walk into any setup confident that you won't feedback
during the afro-raer set?
Priceless.
Or at least a couple hundred.
Given the recent changes of the world climate, I think there's a much larger chance of hell freezing over.
http://www.turntable_lab.com/dj_equipment/42/171/67332.html
(take out the underscore in tt_lab)
or maybe those inflatable floaties that you can put under the legs on the decks.
The feedback is coming from the speakers,
through the ATMOSPHERE, and into his
super-sensitive Shure Whitelables.
He needs signal processing.
I'll look into these, thanx!
Frank
frank... he's right. dont waste time or money on anything else.
1 thing you may want to try is setting up further back on the stage, but besides that, no extra rigging is gonna help.
ps. i heart frank's nights
Yuck.
If you could reasonably cut with them, I would use them too.
They sound better than any DJ cart I have ever tried.
Frank dosen't mix or even really backcue at all, so they are perfect for him.
BAN
For me they just skated all over the damn place, i should revisit since all you serious heads are using.
You cant really get them to hold on even when doing the most basic wickiwicki.
They sound super good, but are ill suited for modern day
disco/hiphop mixing IMO.
On second thought, they would probably rule for those house dudes
that do all of their adjusting with the pitchfader and never touch the record.
The design of the concorde style Ortofons handles bass feedback issues really well IMO. But yeah, other than that the venue you're describing sounds like it' needs to get its act together.
If I could get a cartridge that sounded like the Whitelabels
yet could hold a groove even medium well, I would pay big $$$.
Meh.
I know about this phenomenon, and I would think the average club has
taken care of this if it was wired in the past 50 years.
It sounds like he is dealing with transient feedback, not
electrical feedback.
Maybe I'm wrong. School me.
By the way, Whitelabels don't have tracking issues...if you're experiencing them you're probably setting them up wrong or have something up with your tonearm. You can mix and cut just fine with them if you don't have elephant hands.
Can you please elaborate on this? What is decoupling and how does one decouple?
You're talking about a different subject...Decoupling deals with structural vibrations, each material vibrates at a certain frequency, and this is the issue that occurs when you have feedback problems with your turntable. The resonate frequencies will "feedback" through your phono preamp. The best way to deal with this is to "decouple" the turntable from the surface that it is resting on, thus eliminating resonance from the different materials that are problematic.
The turntales are resting on a 3" thick layer of rubber foam which is glued onto a frame of 2/4s. the whole thing is suspended from the ceiling with 4 steel wires. An additional fifth wire acts as a counterweight and has an attached pull spring held by a hook that sits in an anchor mounted in the floorboard of the stage. The structure that the turntables are sitting on doesn't vibrate.
What vibrates is the turntable itself. There is an almost membrane-thin area on the bottom side of the 1200 that you sometimes can feel vibrating when you softly touch it with a fingertip while rumble occurs.
Another source of feedback can be the record itself vibrating through bass signal that the disc picks up from the air. This often happens when records have an even very slight dish and therefore don't touch the slipmatt in the outer area of the record. Especially when playing the first two tracks.
hook, line and sinker... take the bait. good ol predictable soulstrut.
thats right, your computer is only for chat boards and emails...and popsike. it shall not be used to make/edit/ or play music... ever. your a fraud if you do.
for all the so called purists... please use snail mail, stop using mobile phones, dvds, and any other technological device thats not in step with the logic of strictly vinyl or die.... and while were at it, franks issue of feedback still wont be resolved...suffer you must..along with everybody else that gets pounded away with annoying feedback while at franks night.
in comparison, the solutions offered are a bit absurd, costly and certainly not definitive, all guess work ... does frank own the club ?
waaaay too much bs to go thru for a gig.
all that trouble shooting just to play vinyl, seems..... like its not about the music anymore.
the music is the key.
steppin' into tomorrow.
b/w
dead horse 101.
and the bonus cut... i still buy vinyl.
This is a matter of personal choice and has amongst other things to do with style and marketing.
In my case, nobody is "suffering" from this feedback problem and nobody gets "gets pounded away" by it. I have a fine enough ear to detect the beginning of any rumble early enough to bring down the bass EQ and not let this affect anybody. Several people who have been to both previous events for the entire night and with who I had talked about this told me that they haven't heard a thing. It's a problem that will be solved, nothing more.
For me, aesthetic issues are very important when putting together a club night. You're creating an environment that you rent out to customers in exchange for a cover fee. Playing music from a laptop for me is aesthetically very unappealing.
Not only wouldn't I want to stare at a laptop display when djing my party but I also don't want to present myself this way to the people who come to hear my records.
As I said, it's a personal choice. To each his own.
Personally, I also believe that Microwave is going to have a very negative influence on the dj business. Most importantly, I have observed that now, club turntables are used and abused even worse than before and issues like the rumble problematic often get ignored even more when clubs are setting up and maintaning a dj booth because everybody plays with Microwave. Once you have a dj come in who plays real records, he's fucked but I'm sure you wouldn't care and tell him it's his own problem to not go with the times.
I personally don't give a shit. I can do a party wherever I want to by using my own equipment. I did club nights in shacks in West Africa that didn't even have electricity, bringin my own turntables, mixer, PA, power generator and fuel.
I think that with the further development of new hard- and software, with more and wider availability of soundfiles on the web and faster connection speeds, there will be more and more djs with more and more gigantic collections of mp3s or soundfiles in other formats, swarming the clubs and being willing to play for less and less pay. Promoters will have the choice out of a whole catalogue of interchangeable faces and gimmicks. Real, developed taste and knowledge in music will be less and less important and "skills" won't matter anymore because there will be software that'll do all the mixing, wiggling, juggling and wickiddy-wackeddy anyone could ever ask for. Microwave will do to DJs what the introduction of the CD did to record stores. Wait and see. The music industry shot themselves in the foot with abandoning the record and now it's the djs turn. As with the collpase of the music industry, this will probably get serious with the next generation of consumers.