Hi guys,

Totally agree with you there Graham on the subject of audience mics affecting the sound quality and there are definately merits for both ways.
On the one hand, a completley dry, unaffected mix from FOH can sound great and if you were to listen to it without pictures it would be perfectly fine and an enjoyable experience. However, as Im sure you realise, once you put video to the sound feed, it can often not sound how it looks, which is where Alan and Charles are coming from. The process of adding audience mics into the equation is not as simple as it seems. As you rightly point out, you can hear reflections from the surfaces within the tent which you say degrades the sound quality. The positioning and mixing of the audience mics is vital to maintaining the quality of the mix and in most cases enhancing it. This process requires constant monitoring during every song to create natural lifts during clapping periods and audience participation and just enough ambience during the songs to make it sound LIVE. Therefore mixing to pictures is often the best way to approach doing broadcasting of any sort.

As far as the videos on the website go, they look great and capture the ethos of the festival but as you say Graham the sound is of varying quality due to the ambient instability.

Fantastic idea to broadcast via the website, and I do hope it all works well.

Am still available to help on this free of charge if you like Alan, but either way I will defianately be checking it out on the web as Im sure it will be a great show!

Good luck.

Richard Harrison