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Wow, I thought the world had forgotten my little PA-wonderings! Thanks for the very detailed and guiding replies mhschmieder! I will have to go over your posts several times I think!

I've comed this far in my live gear shopping:
I got the Soundcraft mixer already. It's Lexicon reverb sound great in my ears. And I trigger it with a sustain pedal when I need it. And I feel safe about having a mixer close to me during the show in case somethings goes wrong with the backtracks or if I get feedback. We're doing a lot of impro since we work with traditional storytelling thus everything thats gonna happen in the show cannot be soundchecked.

I haven't bought any speakers yet, the few systems I've tried (HK, BK and Mackie) did not appeal to me.

I did the first single show yesterday and in desperation I took my home stereo amplifier and a pair of home stereo speakers from 1983

In this setup the POD HD 500 sounds OK but not as clean and fat as I know it can sound, the back tracks sounds dull, lacking highs and a bit like a mess. Something close to the HK system I tried a few weeks ago. But the EQ on the Soundcraft helped me out a bit. The voice (mostly speach) and the acoustic guitar works OK because I use 80% direct sound with it and it gets an extra bit of timbre from the Lexicon verb. The whole show runs in a very low volume.

mhschmieder wrote:Any particular reason you want to go stereo? How close will people be? Remember that most live shows only have a few seats where true stereo can be experienced, and for the rest, it is a worse experience than mono.
.

The usual scenario this far will be about 60-90 kids in a small sport hall, sitting on the floor. I can choose myself how close I want them.
Several of the effects in the backtracks are auto-panned, a flying horse comes in from the left and enters right, a car drives by and so on.

I am fully aware of that this present setup will not work when we go to 120 kids in a bigger sport hall But by that time I have hopefully bought a good pair of speakers and a sub thanks to your advice!

Anders

Yeah, I had a feeling that would be the case, having done some shows for kids myself. And I have an auto-panned horse in one of my theatrical productions as well.

The new Soundcraft series is actually a big step up for them, and having the Lexicon reverbs built-in does give you some advantage due to their warmth over Yamaha's or even TC Electronics' low-to-mid-range reverbs. Also, their board layout is now very intuitive and more like Yamaha's.

I find that having at least one band of parametric or mid-sweep EQ on the mixer is essential, along with low cut (i.e. high pass) and some shelving at the high frequencies. Be sure to cut 80-100 Hz on every channel that isn't bass or piano oriented. And you can deal with any room issues with the mid-sweep control, as well as working miracles on overall balance.

mhschmieder wrote:Yeah, I had a feeling that would be the case, having done some shows for kids myself. And I have an auto-panned horse in one of my theatrical productions as well.

Ha ha, great! It's so much fun to do this kind of stuff! Here's mine, DP-made:

http://www.nanoqrecordings.se/Nanoq_rec ... horse.html


[/quote]
I find that having at least one band of parametric or mid-sweep EQ on the mixer is essential, along with low cut (i.e. high pass) and some shelving at the high frequencies. Be sure to cut 80-100 Hz on every channel that isn't bass or piano oriented. And you can deal with any room issues with the mid-sweep control, as well as working miracles on overall balance.[/quote]
Thanks, I'll cut the 100Hz on every channel, thats a good point, I missed out on that during soundcheck yesterday. After all, I am a newbie when it comes to live sound with backtracks and all.