Subwoofer bleed
Hello professionals!
First of all, I hope you all have an amazing New Year!
I’m dealing with an ongoing issue and am slowly running out of ideas. I’m a touring monitor engineer working with a legacy artist who is extremely sensitive to subwoofer bleed onto the stage.
Because of this, we added a mandatory cardioid subwoofer setup to our rider. We are doing 95+ shows per year, and lately we’ve been encountering more and more situations where the cardioid setup is not implemented correctly — whether due to incorrect physical deployment, wrong presets, polarity issues, timing, or simply “cardioid on paper only.”
After the show, both our FOH engineer and I receive negative feedback from the artist:
difficulty singing
poor vocal perception
excessive low-frequency energy on stage
On backing track + live vocal shows, the stage setup is:
minimum 4× L-Acoustics X15HiQ wedges
plus sidefills (KARA, KIVA, or A-Series, depending on stage size)
Despite this, the amount of sub energy reaching the stage remains very problematic for the artist.
Has anyone experienced similar issues with installed or touring PA systems?
I’m trying to find practical solutions and keep the artist comfortable long-term.
And yes — we’ve tried IEMs. The artist is currently on Axient PSM with KLANG, but still prefers wedges. There’s some past IEM trauma from earlier tours before I stepped in, so let’s call this a work in progress.
Also speaking from a FOH point of view. Just as J.R. said, I too get on stage while tuning and during sound checks to understand what the hell is going on up there. It is difficult to fully comprehend what a singer is or is not hearing. You can not "hear" their head voice. Head voice being how you hear your voice in your own head while singing. So it makes it a challenge to get an artist to describe what is masking, aiding, supporting, or distracting their singing. As J.R. said, I fix what I can from FOH and it has never been a show stopper. It might not be the cool ass rockin' show that "I" want it to be, but the guys on stage are in a better place so their performance should reflect that. Sub deployment is part of the Dark Arts. So many "great ideas", so many poor results. I have never found a solution that keeps excessive low end off the stage to the satisfaction of ANY artist I have worked with. MY bigger concern is when did all these artist become so afraid of low end? It seems to be an epidemic.