Balanced armatures, a capacitor that behaves like a resonant filter, sound tubes measured in millimeters, and a bodypack that quietly rewrites your EQ. A field guide to what's really inside a pair of custom in-ears, and why the seal matters more than the driver count.
Your wireless system is an FM radio, a 2:1 compressor, a dice game with reflections, and a gate, all pretending to be a cable. Here's what each piece is doing, with the math, so the next dropout has a cause instead of a ghost.
Almost every PA box is at least two loudspeakers pretending to be one. The crossover is where the pretending happens, and a surprising amount of what goes wrong in the vocal range goes wrong right there.
Delay towers, the speed of sound, and what "aligned" actually means a hundred meters from the stage.
Your PA is a space heater that makes sound as a side effect. Here's the physics of why the rig that slammed at soundcheck sounds smaller at midnight, and what you can actually do about it.
Everything on your stage that isn't a microphone gets to the console through a DI. What's inside the box, why the transformer is the best part, and how to stop piezo quack and ground hum with physics instead of luck.
Six dB per doubling, half a wavelength, and eighty percent of a ribbon. Why the top boxes are flat, the bottom ones are fanned, and the prediction plot was never the room.
Ground loops, leakage current, and the pin 1 problem: why systems hum, why the ground pin is innocent, and how to get a quiet rig without electrocuting anybody.
The humble direct box is the most misunderstood object on your stage. Inside that steel brick is a hundred years of transformer physics, a war over input impedance, and the answer to why the acoustic act sounds like a wasp in a tin.
Power distro, grounds, and the sixty-cycle tax. A field guide to the noise your rig makes when nobody is playing.
Three updates worth knowing about this week. One of them you might want to skip. Yamaha RIVAGE PM V7.10 RIVAGE PM firmware V7.10 is up on Yamaha's download page, and V7.00 has moved to the previous-versions list. The additions are modest. Shure SLXD4+ and
The Woodshed. Weekly long-form, July 2026. For anyone on the crew who owns a threshold knob. Compression is the most-used and worst-understood processor in live sound. Every channel strip has one. Most engineers learned it by copying a screenshot of someone else's settings, and a
Signal Processing
Forget the mixing tips. This is the electronics: what really happens when you sweep a mid, why a Pultec can boost and cut the same note at once, and the op-amp cheat hiding inside almost every console built since 1970.
Wireless & RF
What festival RF coordinators actually do: the tool stack, the advancing, the unspoken hierarchy, and the intermod math. Part 1 of 3.