The Woodshed

The Woodshed

Two drivers, one note: what a crossover actually does

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.

The Woodshed

Late on purpose

Delay towers, the speed of sound, and what "aligned" actually means a hundred meters from the stage.

The Woodshed

Where your decibels go: loudspeaker motors and thermal compression

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.

Signal Path

The little steel box that saves the gig

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.

PA & System Design

The J isn't a style choice: how a line array actually works

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.

Power & Grounding

The buzz is coming from inside the rig

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.

Signal Path

Iron in the path: what a DI box actually does

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 & Grounding

Where hum actually comes from

Power distro, grounds, and the sixty-cycle tax. A field guide to the noise your rig makes when nobody is playing.

Signal Processing

You can't hear it when it's right: compression from the first knob to the mix bus

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

One resistor, one capacitor, and a knob that's lying to you: how an analog EQ actually works

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

Four hundred channels and one piece of dirt: how festival RF coordinators actually do the math

What festival RF coordinators actually do: the tool stack, the advancing, the unspoken hierarchy, and the intermod math. Part 1 of 3.