At a lot of our smaller, Lounge-level gigs, there's quite a lot of pressure to speed up rigging and derigging. One thing I'm thinking of doing is making up sub-multis which have power, speaker lines, and XLR lines all loomed together. The idea is to drop one at each person on stage, and just plug up what's required at the other end. I'd imaging a box with a couple of power outlets, two NL2 speakons, and maybe four XLR lines. This would cover most eventualities for instrumentalists and backline, and maybe build a bigger one for the drumkit. We typically have power, amp rack, and stage box all close enough together that I wouldn't need unmanageably long tails to reach all of them.
We are in 240v land here, so we wouldn't have much issue running power out from a central point. Normally I'm running cables along the same routes, but individual lines, meaning more time spent coiling cables and more general annoyance.
I'm curious if anyone else out there has done something like this. (Or indeed, considered it and decided against) I can see clear advantages to this way of working, wondering if there are any downsides I'm not aware of at the moment.
