Uncontrolled peaking at the soundboard

ikessky · #1 06-26-2011, 07:26 PM

I'm hoping that you guys can help me with something. I plugged my new Peavey Tour TNT 15 in at church today. I plugged into the XLR out on the back of the amp and we began to sound check. The sound guy told me that I was peaking the board and he barely had the gain up. I looked at my settings and my pre-amp gain was only at 1 and my volume at 2. We ended up just mic'ing the amp to get it into the monitors and for recording. I certainly didn't need to be in the PA to help with my volume!

So what the heck is making the XLR peak at the board so bad? I'm playing an Ibanez GSR200. The amp was set for an active bass. If I'm reading the manual correctly, the DI has a failsafe circuitry that allows the DI to work in the even of an amp failure. Could it be that my bass itself is sending to hot of a signal into the amp and it is just bypassing everything and going straight to the board? My brother told me not to worry about it because his band just mics everything back to the soundboard and never uses the DI's when playing live. Everything sounded great this morning when we played, but I would still like to understand what could be causing this.

**Chef** · #2 06-26-2011, 07:28 PM

I'd wager he had your channel strip set to mic, instead of line level.

ikessky · #3 06-26-2011, 07:36 PM

Interesting. I'll have to check that out. We didn't get too much time to look into it because we only had about 45 minutes to run through 4 songs and learn a completely new one for the end of the service.

The other thing I wanted to try was to see if the effect send would send the signal to the board also. I know that a few amps advertise that option (Acoustic B200 combo's come to mind). We'll have to haul gear again some night and see if it works or not.

**Chef** · #4 06-26-2011, 07:42 PM

If he mic'd it successfully on the same channel strip, and didn't switch from line to mic level, I'd again wager that's the culprit.
Mic'ing your cab with the channel set to line level would yield a nearly unusably low level.
Sending line level down a strip set to mic level would yield an very very hot signal.

billfitzmaurice · #5 06-26-2011, 09:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ikessky

I would still like to understand what could be causing this.

A clueless soundman.