Design History

By Dave Rat

The MicroWedge design was originally envisioned in 1996 while I was on tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers. On a bus ride after a show, Tommy Rat and I spent several hours discussing poorly thought out – yet widely accepted – commercial wedge designs.

The audience unplugging connectors, band members tripping on cables, and large unsightly cabinets are just a few of the issues we talked about. Further, most wedges need so much EQ that actually having two wedges sound the same on stage becomes a challenge in itself, not to mention dealing with feedback and wedge placement.

Well, some rough sketches ended up with some notes on a piece of paper that eventually made it into my design notebook. Two years later, those ideas started to become a reality.

Around that time, one of our Rat Sound clients told us that he wanted to switch from Rat M-Wedges to Clair 12am for an upcoming tour. I decided to approach him with a proposition: Rat Sound would build two prototypes of our new design and then provide him with a shoot-out between the prototypes, Rat M-Wedge, Clair 12am and L-Acoustics 115FM. The prototypes proved the clear winner, so we built six more to do the tour. We kept the account, and filed for a patent on the design as well as a copyright on the name… and the "MicroWedge" was born.

From the outset, MicroWedge proved an all-around success. We started putting them on higher volume clients and could not keep them in the shop. After some discussion, Rat Sound decided to approach reputable manufacturers with the design to see if at least one of them was interested in manufacturing and distributing MicroWedge. The response exceeded all of our expectations - not only was the design embraced, but the outside support furthered the design, including helping to refine the port/connector design and introducing the integral handle.

MicroWedge has gone on to be utilized worldwide, proving popular not just with top-10-artist tours, but also in applications such as houses of worship and regional sound companies. Now, with the contribution of the considerable engineering and manufacturing resources of EAW, MicroWedge has gone to a whole new level.