Major Tune Up

We just crossed the 100,000 mile mark on our "new" auditorium sound system. Five years ago, we fired it up for the first time. This week was the first major tune up of its life.

Brad and Joe from M&L Sound in Knoxville, TN just finished a Santa-Claus-type "checking-it-twice" run-through of our whole system.

Overall, it was good news:

• Only 1 driver was blown after five years, and that was on a choir monitor that we rarely use.
• Our various line problems seemed solvable with various methods of repair.
• They cleaned everything up like new.
• They solidified all the "loose" connectors, buttons, and so forth.
• They confirmed that our unbalanced headphone lines are still noiseless.

What I learned:

• Most of our dbx compressors are shot. Did we get a bad batch?
• Our Crest LMx monitor console has ALWAYS ON insert points (I should have known this). If the insert point fails either at the board or the patch bay, the channel goes dead. Hmmm...
• A good deal of the non-functioning components were due to simple user errors (misplugged, buttons pushed, half-engaged connectors). I'll need to be more thorough in my double-checks on problem claims.

The strangest issue that they ran across was one of those mysterious "intermittent" problems that had completely baffled me and all my techs. One of our wireless vocal mics would occasionally be half-legged to our monitor mix console. Other times it was fine. The problem? A short in the front-of-house patch bay made the mic line half-legged UNLESS there was a patch cable in the microphone line patch point. The patch cable didn't even need to be attached to anything else, but just inserted in the bay on one end. Anyway, they bravely pulled out the patch bay and got it working correctly again.

It feels great to have confidence in all the system pieces as we get into this coming weekend!