Round 3: Will it work? Should I do it?

Posted on Mar 11, 2009 03:51 pm
Doug Babbitt
Sound as good as you play
Member Since: Dec 23, 2008

During the winter, my wife and I are heavily involved in organizing and running alpine ski races at a local resort. As the sun shines a bit stronger and the temperatures rise late in the season, a little music through the PA seems appropriate and makes the whole atmosphere more festive.

Up till now, we've just patched a CD player into the crappy announcement PA. I'm not exactly sure how the system is put together.

My thought is to run both the announcement mic and the music source (MP3 player most likely) through a mixer and send the combined signal to my powered Mackie SRM450s. So far so good, right?

Here's the twist - rather than have the announcer messing with the channel faders when switching from announcing to music and back, can I run the music signal through one channel of a DBX166XL compressor and somehow use the microphone signal to trigger compression of the music via the sidechain on the compressor?

The idea would be to automatically squash the music so that you can hear the announcement, then let it bounce back up when the announcement is done. I think that I read about this as an application for a compressor, but now I can't find it.

If it is possible, how do I tie it together and what sort of compressor settings would make a good starting point? I'm thinking fast attack to quickly catch the first part of an announcement and slow release to allow the speaker to pause briefly without the music bouncing back too soon.

Thanks for any and all comments.

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