Forty years ago Galaxy Audio pioneered the small PA/personal monitor category with the HotSpot. In 2017, FOH Engineer Robert Scovill made good use of the performers on Tom Petty’s 40th Anniversary Tour.
Early in the tour Scovill utilised a pair of Galaxy Audio PA6BT Hot Spots at FOH and another at monitor world. “They were absolutely the perfect choice for our shout system. I had our stage technician Fumi Okazaki on a wireless headset coming out of one speaker and monitor engineer Greg Looper coming from the other. The second set of inputs on the Hot Spots allowed me to route one of my stereo solo buses to them as well.”
In smaller rehearsal spaces, Scovill offered Benmont Tench, Petty’s pianist and keyboard player, a pair of Galaxy Audio PA6S Hot Spots as an alternative to his large format monitors. “This gave him a way to play quietly when needed in the rehearsals,” Scovill said. “It was kind of funny in that, Benmont remembered using Hot Spots on a 1970’s Saturday Night Live performance. It was a fantastic solution!”
For drummer Steve Ferrone Scovill used 4 overhead microphones on the drum kit and pays very close attention to the arrival time of the snare drum to these positions. To check and achieve the desired alignment of these channels, Scovill built a PA6S Hot Spot into the shell of a snare drum. He temporarily replaces the actual drum with this “speaker drum” and physically adjusts the microphone positions while viewing the phase trace in an FFT analyzer with the Hot Spot delivering pink noise as the source.
Scovill concluded: “It’s refreshing to see a product like the Hot Spot that has evolved over 40 years and hasn’t lost its soul! It’s an absolute proof of concept that the idea was right the very first day and it’s still right 40 years later. So it’s the oldest adage in the world, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!’”
