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In a PA/live playback situation, how to deal with temporary and sudden increase in signal? Situation is as follows: a mic is in the middle of the room and nearby a person talks and sings. Now and then audience which is standing very close - 2 meters away in a semi-circle joins in an sings loudly thereby increasing the signal volume suddenly - this causes clipping on main set of speakers and also the broadcasted stream which is taken off main mix sounds garbage.

How to deal with this? manually adjust when audience joins in and leaves or are there any tricks like reducing gain level on mic?

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    A possible solution (if you aren't already doing something like this) is compression on the mic channel or limiting on the mic channel or master bus.
    – Linuxios
    Dec 31, 2016 at 3:46

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This is partly a mic-technique issue for the person talking and singing - they need to be a lot closer to the microphone than they currently are. Vocal microphones such as SM58 are designed for hand-held use and should be no further than a fist away from the mouth when in use. This will allow you to attain a much better gain-before-feedback result and will not be affected by the 'audience'.

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  • Hi. Thanks - my "solution" was this: a) adjust the gain on mic way down so it doesn't pick up ambient signals b) carefully re-position the mic c) be active in adjusting mic volume on the mix deck when someone moved a bit far away from it.
    – Konrads
    Jan 1, 2017 at 17:14

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