Had too interesting trouble shooting situations.

Jay Barracato

Graduate Student
Jan 11, 2011
1,528
4
38
Solomons MD
Yesterday, band came in that had 4 members on wedges, one on hard wired iems, and the last on wireless iems. They also had two channels of their own wireless mics. Right from the get go, one of the wireless signals just didn't seem right, brittle and on the edge of feedback without any significant gain. Right when I added the mic to his in ears, the channel took off. Checked all my settings and found nothing out of wack. Asked their "manager" to double check at the stage and found that they had a separate "emergency" split off the mic wired direct to the ears. Except on the dim stage he had patched, not to the input if the ears, but to the output.

As nasty of an instant loop as accidentally patching the output of an effect on a digital board back to its input.

The band tonight is mixing their own ears with a digital Mackie via their phones. I had a significant hum on the keys channel, that I found was being caused by a power strip with several USB wall power supplies plugged into it. While a power strip is almost always the first place I start troubleshooting that type of noise, I had to wonder how many musicians are causing themselves trouble by plugging the ubiquitous USB chargers into their rigs.

Anybody know anything about the chargers design and their possible noise problems?

Both stories demonstrate why I always try to participate in every bands setup no matter how self contained they are on stage. Having an idea of what they are trying to do at the source end makes troubleshooting a lot easier.

Sent from my XT1254