CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, March 08, 2023

Common Denominator: Bringing Sanity To Signal Routing On Stage

ProSoundWeb: Today’s live stage productions have become tremendously complex. All sorts of different instruments and electronic sources must be “orchestrated” along side the microphones and signals that need to be split off to a multitude of mixers to feed the house system, stage monitors, in-ear monitors, broadcast truck, Internet uplink and recording system.

1 comment:

Gemma said...

This was a really interesting read of an article. Signal flow can be so incredibly complex sometimes, especially with the scale of live entertainment nowadays, and being able to streamline, simplify and standardize your system is really important. I appreciate how the author walks through different common areas of signal flow - signal path, setting levels, crosstalk in the snake and feeding this output into other devices. I also appreciated the breaking down of the different signal lengths - it’s very informational how this article is laid out. Overall, I think that the point of this article - to bring sanity to signal routing is really important, no matter the scale of your show. Making sure that folks can understand your system and signal flow well enough to help or lead troubleshooting efforts is paramount to smooth sailing in the technical world. This article would be a good read for many folks in live entertainment I think, it has lessons in organization and simplicity for all.