Pro Sound Web: Among many of the recent entrants into the sound profession, I’ve noticed a lack of knowledge when it comes to wiring a stage.
Perhaps it’s due to a lot of sound engineering schools being essentially studio-based courses. Or maybe it’s simply that it’s difficult to get a young mind to concentrate on something as mundane as running cable when there is a digital board with loads of lights and buttons sitting in the corner of the room!
4 comments:
Though this article talks about audio cables, I think the point of this article applies to any department running cable. I think the author has a point about young people and wanting to sit and play with the fancy board rather than run cable. In addition, it seems that younger generations don’t have a good sense of troubleshooting. No matter how far technology goes, there will always be a need for this and good cable management is one of the first and most important steps in troubleshooting. If you don’t know where your cables are going or what they’re for, it is nearly impossible to troubleshoot a single run without looking at the system as a whole. The “load out starts at load in” mentality is on that I haven’t heard before but it makes sense. I know that things can be rushed and hurried at load in, but that isn’t a reason to not dress cables properly – especially when they pose a safety hazard.
In my experience I have always focused a lot on good cable management. Starting out with both theatre mobile DJing work, I soon learned how important good cable management is and how it can be safer, give a cleaner look, make troubleshooting much easier, and allow for an easier load-out. I have worked in places where the cable management is far from optimal, and it made trouble shooting a nightmare. I was being paid hourly, so I didn’t mind as much, but it was still frustrating and unnecessary. Additionally, tripping hazards that can be avoided should be avoided, and it’s bad for a cable to have foot traffic on it. This is an example of why planning cable runs ahead of time is important. Planning is also important because it allows you to be more efficient in your cable runs, preventing you from being redundant or using too much or too little cable. This article offers some good tips. One that I’m definitely a fan of is being mindful in where you leave your slack. Leaving slack near the snake doesn’t do you much good if a performer needs to move a mic stand farther away on stage. It’s also true that keeping your cable box handy is a must. Don’t put it back in the truck! You never know, you may need to run onstage with a 10’ XLR at any moment!
I never was really good at running cable.
This article has some good pointers and tips. The guidelines are all pretty solid. It's not just applicable to sound either, lighting, media, and even scenery these days all incorporate a lot of cables.
I just wonder how long it's going to be before cabling up any gig is easy. We already have networked snakes.
I wonder how long it will be until everything just daisy chains itself. There isn't anything on stage anymore that can't sound just as good digitally as it does analog. I know plenty of people will disagree with that, but if it's not true today, it might be very soon. I just wonder how long it will take for power and data to be carried on the same cable assembly, all sound devices get an address and every device connects to every other device. It's seriously not that hard. No more snakes, no more 100' cables because you couldn't find a 20', no more jumbled heap of wires. Every mic plug into the next closest mix, and so on, in the most efficient pattern, and it connects to a plug off stage.
The Source Four LED units already do that.....power daisy chains, data daisy chains....it's coming.
So you know that brand new 64 channel copper audio snake you just bought? Useless in 5 years.
Cable management is a thing that makes me apoplectic.
It is so not hard to run cable correctly, and when you do, it's safer, neater, more attractive, better for the cable, easier to troubleshoot, and frankly makes you look like a professional, instead of some high school lackey. So why then, do so many professional, well-paid technicians run cables like crap? Is it because they're too rushed? Just don't care? Are unaware of how poorly a tangle of cables looks to anyone who may not understand what you do but is in a place to judge your competence at doing it? I don't really have the answer for that.
I do wish the article talked a little more about solutions for when you just don't have any appropriate-sized cables left. I understand you always want the shortest length possible, it seems inevitable that an organization runs out of cable at least once a show.
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