Beheringer Sharc: End to Close Mic Dilemas?

[Ctenorman]

Hey Guys, I was just looking around the music store we have in town, and I noticed they have something called the Beheringer Sharc, which basically prevents all feedback from happening, or so it's supposed to. I guess the basic idea is that it uses a 60 band graphic equalizer, and if any of the bands start to jump up or show feedback behaviour, it levels the frequencies off. I've got an effects board, a Zoom 707, a wonderful little guy for guitars that does a great job for sax. I use for a bunch of stuff like chorus, harmonization, reverb/echo, stuff like that. But I'd really love to use some of the crazy guitar effects, which I can only use when practicing with headphones on (no feedback). Does anyone have any experience with the Sharc, and know whether it really would solve these problems? And if it does, well, I guess that would kind of help with all the close micing we seem to be forced to do as well. All the best,

Scott

[Subtone Sam]

Ctenorman,I used the Shark for short period of time and it worked OK.I used it on mic/personal powered monitor setup.

[sessionsax]

Feedback eliminators can really kill the clarity of a mix. A lot of sound engineers try to use one of these rather than properly eq-ing the room prior to putting one of these into the signal path. The result is that the feedback eliminator kills certain frequencies from the mix. A lot of time, the frequencies fall into whats critical for clear sound reproduction. These things can really kill 2 - 4 K which adds the sheen to the sound. Sure mike have prescence peaks that these eliminator tend to kill.

[Saxhound]

I use one in my monitor mix, but never in the mains. I have the Behringer 1100P for my big PA set-up, and set it with 2 roving filters per channel, and let the other filters find and lock troublesome frequencies. Works great. I use the Sharc with my small PA (Mackie 408 powered mixer), and that works nicely too, but sometimes it runs out of filters, and I will get some feedback - particularly when the vocalist points her microphone directly at the monitor!