The guy at the board

First thing. A front of house mix is not a mix. It is a correction. I am adding back the things the room is eating and pulling out the things the room is doubling. If the kick is already shaking the floor I am barely putting any kick in the PA at all. So when a band says hey can we just take the main out and stream it, what they are asking for is a stream of my corrections without the room those corrections were correcting.

You get a mix with no bottom, no drums to speak of, vocals sitting way up in front like a karaoke track, and a weird empty hole where the actual show was. It is not that it sounds bad exactly. It sounds wrong. People in earbuds three states away cannot tell you why but they can tell.

The fix is boring and it is the same fix its always been. Take a seperate send. Most desks worth anything have a matrix or a spare aux, and if the desk is digital you have got a whole second bus sitting there doing nothing. Build the stream mix on that one. Everything up, drums actually present, bass actually there, and then — this is the part people skip — put a room mic in it. One condenser up in the air, doesnt have to be fancy, doesnt have to be two of them. Bring it up till you can hear the crowd and then back it off a hair.

That room mic is doing something you cannot fake. It tells the person listening at home that they are at a show. Without it a stream sounds like a rehearsal. With it, when the room yells at the end of a song, the person in the parking lot in another state yells too. I have watched that happen and its a little bit uncanny.

The other question I get is whether it is a hassle for me on a busy night, and honestly no. It is one send that I set once during check and then never touch again. Its a phone or a little interface plugged into the matrix out and thats it. There is no rack piece, no transmitter, nothing that needs a channel plan or a frequency coordination, which given that I already fight for RF space with eight wireless packs and the venue wifi is genuinely a relief. And the band is selling passes on it, which means the band is in a better mood, which means my night is better.

One warning, because somebody is gonna do it and then blame the software. Do not run the stream off a phone sitting on the amp. I know. Somebody always does. Get a cheap two channel interface, get it off the stage, and give it its own connection if the venue has one. The thing that makes a stream sound cheap is almost never the stream.