Speakers feed sound back through Lapel, any solution?

[c]

I'm am running the audio for a church that is meeting in cinema theater.

I have not had too much experience with audio equipment and i'm pretty much learning as I go.

This church incorporates phone interviews into the service to get different views or a better understanding on different issues.

The setup: we run the cell phone through the mixer (so the person on the phone can talk through the cinema speakers) and then use an output to send conversation back through the phone (pastor's lapel to person on the phone).

Right now with this setup when the person on the cell phone speaks all lapels have to be muted so that their voice is not feedback through the pastors lapel. Since the lapels have to be muted the pastor or other speakers are not able to stop the person on the cell phone and ask for futher explanation on a paticular topic or just add comments.

Since the theater has surround sound there is not a neutral place where the lapel will be sufficient and not pick up the voice from the speakers. I know a handheld mic would work better, but we really perfer the lapels over the handheld. I was wondering if we could use some kind of filter or a different setup? I do have a limited budget, any suggestions will help though.

Thank you
C

[elektro80]

The usual way to handle this is to totally separate the telephone hybrid stuff from the venue. Basically you make two mixes. One handles the venue sound and the the other is what goes in and out of the TH. The feed that goes to the TH should preferable be from a mic like this:



If you use a pro modern venue mixer you can probably save scenes innit, so you can make presets for various tasks like TH handling and more. Such a scene could handle the surround stuff in a way that also minimizes the feedback risk.

There are many feedback killer devices available from many different vendors. It is not unlikely that you should consider getting such a device.

This one is almost for free and it kinda works kinda OK some of the time.
http://www.behringer.com/FBQ2496/index.cfm?lang=ENG
I do however recommend that you consider both isolating the mixes, using a more suitable mic and get some feeback killer gear. There is more pro stuff around than the Behringer unit though.

I also recommend you hire a pro for setting this up and figuring out the optimal solution.

[elektro80]

Are you using a gate already? You might really want to do some ducking.

[elektro80]

And now for the intermission:

[seraph]

[elektro80]

wunderbaum!