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.
I’m late to the convo as well, but I too have experienced the incorrect presets, different deployment, mix of speakers/brands, and just general sub issues on a day to day.
My current artist is also sub sensitive, and for us, it seems to be the coupling at 100-125 that gets him. I do a lot of carving on a daily basis to get it where it’s comfortable on deck after a walk onstage. A couple of our band members help out with this also, as they know where the trouble lies. It’s not always ideal, and sometimes it’s just a case of driving less sub, but we have managed to make it work, and it never be too bad as of late.
I think it really comes down to being aware of the problem, pinpointing the trouble spot, and focusing on that in particular every day.
I will add that it’s almost NEVER an issue on the big properly deployed festival rigs and the like. It’s always the clubs and theaters. Unfortunately, probably 60 of our 80 dates a year are in clubs and theaters.