Pro Sound Web: Your worship leader has been knocked to the floor as his monitor wedge suddenly explodes with a huge volume increase. The church service ends and you’ve got 30 minutes until the next service to find the problem and fix it. Where do you start?
A very similar scenario happened to a friend of mine working in pro audio. Only it happened for four nights in a row until the problem was solved. And the primary reason it took so long to fix was that someone above him didn’t recognize the ways equipment can fail and thus denied his request for a swap of a particular piece of gear.
7 comments:
I have a friend who works (apparently in the same capacity) at a church where he goes to school. I've also worked at public middle and elementary schools. Although I haven't had a mixer blow on me (yet), I have had several issues that took days to resolve because the people managing the system honestly did not know what they were dealing with, and thus were only willing to deal with problems that were cheap and easy to fix. I was working at a junior high once, and the rack we use to power all of the mic receivers was busted. I was alone on sound, and the people who had the power to buy a new rack refused. I had to build a christmas tree of power strips, and unplug each receiver from the rack and plug them in to power strips. Interestingly enough, I told the TD for the high school who also had power at the junior high, and the next year, the entire system was upgraded to a permanent rack mount, a Yamaha semi-digital mixer, new ETC sensor dimmer racks for lighting...so obviously they could have bought a new power source for the show I was on.
Of course. The more ways you know something can fail, the more prepared you can be to deal with a failure and the quicker you can troubleshoot what's wrong. It seems, though, that the article is making an argument less for the sound engineer knowing the ways in which something can fail, and more for the person in control of the budget knowing all the ways in which something could fail, which does rather make the sound engineer a bit redundant. It does make sense that those in charge of the money would prefer that you run through all other possible ways of solving a problem before settling on what could be the more expensive option.
This article really only has one message for me, know your equipment and when its messed up. The article talks about what could be the issue, and how to source it. Although it doesnt go into much detail about how they came to the conclusion, it really only tells you to know what failed and why. It seems to me like the issue here was the people with the money. So, if you know your equipment and when its messed up, know how to tell the people with the money why. Id hope that you would have the knowledge about equipment you work with, the next is to know how to communicate. Sometimes you just need to try harder, and if that doesnt work, then you are in the wrong place.
This article makes me think of two things. First, sound can be really hard. I sometime teach people sound systems and I can show you how to put together a basic sound system very quickly, but where the real challenge is with sound is the troubleshooting. When your system fails, how do you fix it? That can take years to learn and even then you can always find some new problem. The other debate I would raise is the idea of time vs money. If you need your show to get back up, and the sound guy knows where the problem is (in the mixer), why would you have him check everything out. Its probably cheaper for you to just fix the damn mixer than to pay him the time to check everything.
After experiencing a scenario almost identical to this when I attempted to work in the sound booth at my church's highschool youth group, I find this information almost invaluable. After trying to replace every part of the sound system we had running in the old renovated garage, I finally narrowed it down to being an issue with the output of the mixer. Sound seems to be one of the most difficult departments to troubleshoot, more than likely there's barely any visual elements to it so it is hard to locate a issue directly.
Sure, this article made kind of a simple point, as AJ pointed out, but it's a hugely important one that might not actually be that simple. The most important part of troubleshooting a system is to be able to think through all of the possibilities and not just start replacing things and hoping for the best. The thought process that the article goes through in explaining how to determine that it's the mixer that is busted isn't that difficult to think through for a sound person, and in the end would have saved a lot of time if the people with the money had trusted this person's diagnosis. However, I do see why the people with the money would have wanted to absolutely, 100% verify that it was in fact the mixer that was the problem and not anything else. Getting a new mixer or even repairing an old one is a significant investment, and so I do think that the author of this article was a little unfair to the money people. Replacing a cable or changing out a monitor doesn't take much money (and maybe not much time, depending on the cable run and the monitor placement), and so double-checking all of the other parts of the system was simply hedging their bets.
I don't know all that much about sound, but I found the troubleshooting process that the author talked about was really interesting. Troubleshooting can be horribly annoying, and the authors by knowing how things work, and how they break, is spot on. The method of just figuring out if it can break that way was really interesting, and even though I didn't really know the technical side of what was being discussed, it made a lot of sense. Also, I found it really amusing that the higher up person didn't listen to what the person troubleshooting suggested until four days later.
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