An exclusive interview with Dave “Rat” Levine about the MicroWedge Series

1) Where did the idea to develop the MicroWedge come from?

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 myself spent several hours discussing how poorly thought out the accepted commercial wedge designs are.

The audience unplugging connectors, band members tripping on cables and large unsightly cabinets were just a few of the issues and that was before you even heard them. Then 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.

2) How much input do the groups / bands have in the design of the MicroWedge?

The input from artists, engineers and sound companies was the motivating force behind the creation of the MicroWedge series of products and remains instrumental in defining and refining the designs.  I believe I am in somewhat of a unique position in that I am a sound engineer, a sound system designer as well as deeply involved from the sound vendor side as well.  By utilizing the three perspectives and also gathering input from the engineers, sound companies and manufacturers that I know and work with, I am extremely fortunate to be able to compile and compare the various needs and desires and distill solutions.

3) Why is using a coaxial design better than a conventional horn / woofer design?

One of the major downfall of a conventional separate 'horn and woofer' stage monitor design is that there is a 'side to side' or 'front to back' distance between the  HF and LF drivers. That means that as the artist moves around he or she is getting slightly closer or farther from the HF in relation to the LF.  If the monitor is perfectly EQ'ed on axis, then off axis there interaction between the HF and LF will change causing tonality issues and increasing the susceptibility to feedback.

Conversely, with a coaxial design acts as a point source and the artist remains equidistant from the HF and LF regardless of where they move.  This results in a considerable increase in tonal stability and feedback resistance.

Other advantages of the coaxial design is their inherent symmetry, and reduced size.

4) Why do these wedges have so much bottom-end?

Most engineers are familiar with half-space coupling either by name or experience.  When you put subwoofers on the ground you get more low end than when you elevate them.  Years ago on some other wedge designs I did some testing and found that by coupling the tuning port to the floor, a significant amount of additional low end power can be realized.  Combine that with the high power woofer that was carefully selected and we ended up with the MicroWedge 12 putting out as much or more low end that every 15" monitor we tested against and we tested against the top world class monitors.

5) Explain the "blue" preset for the DSP and why it is so important.

There are three presets currently released for the MicroWedge products. White, Gray and Blue.  I really wanted to do something different here than the typical industry status quo.

For many years, manufacturers and sound companies provided 'raw' speakers with no EQ and left it up to the engineers to tune the sound to their liking.  Then someone came up with this wonderful idea of supplying speakers with a black-box processor that made the loudspeaker sound 'correct'.  This worked wonders and has become the norm.  This concept is behind the White settings which is flat, correct, and a great starting point for engineers that want to tune the wedges for their specific application.

The Gray setting is a bit different in that it has a slight roll off of the high frequencies.  Since typical show venues tend to be less than acoustically optimum, the slightly darker tone of the Gray setting helps offset some acoustic brightness in the venue.

With many years working shows and seeing the reality of loadins, schedules and other variables, I had this idea "What if the monitors had a processor setting that was pre-eq'ed to minimize feedback rather than purely EQ'ed to correct?"  How cool would that be to be able to truly plug-and-play without relying on additional EQ or spending time ringing out  the wedges? That seemed to be a challenging task indeed but I was determined to see if it was feasible.

While out at the EAW engineering lab, I had brought with me a bunch of popular vocal mics with me and we ran frequency response curves on all of them.  What we found was really interesting.  Every one of the mics had a peak in the 2.5K to 3.5 region an the responses had some distinct similarities.

We then averaged those response curves together and inverted the result.  The big surprise came when we found that if we added that inverted curve to the White setting and the Micro's got extremely loud with all the microphones and I could still point the mic right at the wedge without feedback.  So that became the Blue setting as in 'Blue Collar Worker Setting.'