Record audio from PA system mixer to my laptop?
Hi my friend is a wedding/event Videographer. there will be a college music presentation held at the hotel ballroom this coming Friday. so my friend is in charge of recording video throughout the whole event. however he wants a backup audio for the music session so he asked me if i can help him out. i suppose a PA system will be used during the event and i want to find out what is the most commonly used cable for recording stereo track from the mixer to my laptop? and what is the possible output from that mixer? i have a Roland Edirol UA-25 Audio Interface connects to my laptop, what cables do i need? just in case if the cable does not suit the mixer output then what else should i keep on hand?
thank you so much!!!
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To answer your question directly, the most common PA monitor out - presuming it is a decent PA system - will be XLR.
I strongly suggest NOT using a board feed... and here's why:
The board feed will have the mics feeding the audio into the PA system. EVERYTHING needs to be mic'd independently.
What the house hears is a combination of the mic'd audio sources and unmic'd.
We don't know what "college music presentation" means. But let's pretend... 3-5 various stringed instruments + a soloist. Typically, the "background" 3-5 instruments will have a mic or two and they won't play very loud, anyway - but the soloists are usually working pretty hard and pumping out some audio - which means their gain to the board will be low. The house hears a nice audio mix because of the combination of the live and PA-"enhanced" audio.
Try this a different way - but more apparent... Take a band... in a small or mid-sized venue. The guitar and amp is really loud and rarely mic'd. Nature of the instrument. Possibly the same for the bass, and keyboards. For sure no mics on the drums. But vocals - they don't have an amp, so they get the PA... what the board mix gets is LOTS of vocals - and no other instruments unless they bleed in through the mic.
If the person running the board knows what they are doing and is willing to send you a couple (remember, stereo) of discrete AUX sends with a nicely mixed audio presentation - and that means every single instrument has its own mic and they are mixed very nicely - then that's cool... otherwise, just use a good stereo mic (like a Audio Technica AT-825 or Shure VP-88 or RODE NT-4) or a couple of decent condenser mics in an X-Y pattern and pick up the performance audio from a good spot in the house.
A board mix is always my LAST choice - and ONLY when I know the audio engineer and ONLY when I can be on-site a few hours early for a sound check.
You don't say what your PA "System" consists of. Speakon, as the name implies, is speaker signals, and at that amplified speaker level audio, not line or mic level. Your computer has line audio. 1/4" is used for speaker level, and rarely XLR is also. 1/4" and XLR are used for mic and line also. If you have straight unpowered speakers, you absolutely need a PA amplifier. If you have powered speakers (they will have a power in, likely AC), you can likely use a USB audio interface box which has line level XLR outs, or use the same through the amplifier you will get if you have unpowered speakers.
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