[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Welcome to the Forum, Eric!

If I understand right, you’re using the BSS for room tuning and the Sabine for feedback control, and you want to replace the Sabine?

The BFD is pretty much universally panned by live sound professionals – not sure exactly why, but you’ll have no problem getting feedback about it from the Live Audio Board (no pun intended).

I’m not sure how well REW would work well for this, at least as far as the BFD is concerned. As you probably know, feedback is a combination of the speaker’s and the mic’s response. I suppose you can get the mic signal(s) fed to REW easy enough via the Soundweb, and probably do a MIDI connection to the BFD from it. But when REW is told to look for peaks, AFAIK it’s going to look for all peaks, not just the potential feedback peaks, and since you’re sweeping for full-range response, it’s going to use all 12 of the BFD’s filters – count on it. So you’d have to manually undo all the peaks not related to feedback. Perhaps John can comment further – I’m still getting my feet wet with REW.

Personally I just use an analog parametric for feedback control, ‘cause it’s quick and easy. I just dial in a tight bandwidth like 1/12-octave or less, cut 6-10 dB or so, and sweep the frequency knob. When you hit the ringing frequency, it sucks it right out. Only takes a few seconds. Then I push the mic level a little higher and hit the next ringing spot. Typically analog parametrics only have five bands or so, but you seldom have even than many feeding frequencies.

Not to mention, if you encounter a feedback problem during the show, especially one of those barely-ringing, just-under-the-threshold problems, you can easily deal with it with an analog parametric. Not so with the BFD.

Regards,
Wayne