Never update firmware at a show!!!

B

Brian jojade

Senior
Jan 15, 2011
718
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Wausau, WI
www.happymacshop.com
I'm at a multi-day event, using my new QSC PLD amps. 3 PLD 4.5's rocking the mains for the last 3 days in 90+ degree heat, no issues. Watching the thermal level, and they got up to about 50 degrees C at the peak, averaging less than 40. The manual says they will start limiting at 69, and shut down at 80. That's a LOT of breathing room. They seem to run MUCH cooler than the 4 PLX3602's I was using last year.

Well, now to the stupid. I have a 4th amp, a brand new PLD 4.2 that is being used as fills. The amp was working just fine, but when I tried to monitor it with Amplifier Navigator, it said it needed a firmware update. No big deal. I waited until everything was done for the day, and ran the firmware update from my mac. Everything started fine, but then, uh oh, Update error showed on the mac, and the amp was DEAD. No lights, no display, nothing responding. It didn't show up in the amplifier navigator. Gah.

It was late, so I just swapped it out with the PLX3602 that did the job last year. Of note, the 3602 runs noticeably warmer than the new PLD amp.

Anyway, I had some time, so I did a little research on the dead amp. QSC does have another update utility you can use to update the amp if the update fails. The catch is, the updater is Windows only. Ugh. Well, I happened to have Parallels installed on my Mac with Windows 7. The update utility recognized the amp, and was able to upload the firmware and the amp fired back up to life.

The firmware wasn't necessary, but I wanted to be able to monitor the temperature, especially since this is the first real test of this amp in an outdoor show. In the end, not a crisis, but had I not had a spare ready to go, it would have been a lot more stressful.
 
Re: Never update firmware at a show!!!

Quite a few years ago I locked up a dbx 4800 about 6 hours before a Joe Walsh show because the silly System Architect programmers allowed you to check "update firmware" for the unit... yet, it needs its own update utility or needs to be done through the serial port....or something odd. I ended up pulling a unit out of monitor world and reprogramming it to make it through the gig.

On the next gig, I was sharing a network with the monitor engineer and he pushed a System Architect venue (to just his monitor equipment) right before soundcheck...which turned the borrowed FOH driverack, back into a monitor driverack. Quite a lot of lessons learned. We stay completely separate networks now.
 
Re: Never update firmware at a show!!!

Tower of Power: "Don't Change Horses (In the Middle of the Stream)" Whenever you're tempted, just sing that song to yourself. This applies to a lot more than doing sound. Why would I think this? 8O~8-O~:shock: Best, --Frank
 
Re: Never update firmware at a show!!!

Years ago during a talk section of a show I pushed a firmware update to an unused Lake Contour. I was also running Dante for FOH on the same network. The firmware download went fine, then as the Contour rebooted there was a snat on FOH as (I'm guessing) the Dante stream was briefly interrupted. Not sure how since the Contour doesn't talk Dante and the network switches' QoS should have kept everything separate. I figured from from then on let sleeping dogs lie, no matter how bored!!
 
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