Is this thing on?

Finished up the current musical while trying to recover from a bout with the flu. Sunday was two performances, then strike. An hour after leaving the building I was asleep. Woke up at midnight, ravenous. Ate, went back to bed and slept till noon.

So now I'm shopping for wireless microphones. Finally decided it makes the most sense to own a few channels of my own, and rent them to those (few) clients that are willing to pay a few bucks for gear. Browsing eBay over coffee, with the widest possible search parameters so I can pick up those gems that got mis-catted and thus missed by everyone else.

I'm pretty much determined to put together a rack of 4 to 6 Sennheiser G3's. I've been using that model quite a bit of late and I have been very happy with their performance. But I'm keeping my eyes open. I am too "Shure? Unsure!" to want any more SLX's that aren't for a really, really good price. And I know ULX's are out of my price range at the moment, and most of the UC's are in the dreaded 700 band. Plus of course I know better than to get anything with the name "Nady" on it.

I've got one eye open for antenna distros. Although I shouldn't need one for my Sennies, I have wished for a while I could talk one of my clients into hanging one on their small collection of SLX's. The built-in quarter-waves barely punch a signal from stage to wing! But this is the company that will only grudgingly pay rent on some much-needed channels -- talking them into almost a thousand bucks of directional antenna and antenna distribution is not really on.

I'm going to be pushing pretty hard at the short-lived surplus from cashing out my IRA to do this much. Down the road will be getting B3's for all my mics, plus purchasing one or two snap-on transmitters so I can offer hand-held as an option as well. And...if it turns out I'm not getting a clean signal in the venues I work...antenna distro for them, too.



Oud Laptop finished the show with flying colors. At this point I'm leery of cracking the case again to experiment with the ATA connector. Well...there's a children's musical in the same building, so I'll wait until that is over before I take the laptop home.

Meanwhile my rebuilt gighertz titanium has lost picture. I think I got some oil from a Chinese take-out in it when the latter got loose in my gig bag. So on the schedule for this week is to strip it down again, clean it, test the fans are still running, clean the connectors -- and prepare to install a new display inverter perhaps. I'm hoping it isn't VRAM at fault, which I believe is soldered on the MOBO. Or worse yet, the LCD itself -- you can get them surplus, but they are a huge, huge pain to replace.