We spent a good bit of time in the last two weeks rearranging things in the control room to take advantage of the new Yamaha PM5d digital mixer.
One of the cool things about this mixer was that we really didn't need to change a whole lot to get it up and running. It plugged right up to the old mixer's harness. I think I needed to cut about four wire-ties to make things reach.
Of course, there are some differences that required some re-wiring and patch bay changes (lots of re-labeling). For instance, the new mixer doesn't have insert jacks. We only had twelve inserts wired to the patch bay for use on the PM4000 so we had a total of 24 patch points there to reclaim. I think those all went to the MY8ADDA card that we had installed in the new mixer. That's a card that gives you eight more input points and eight output ports to the mixer, all analog. It doesn't give you any more mixes or channels but you need it if you want to do any inserts or direct outs on the 5d. One advantage of digital mixers is the ability to multi-patch outputs. If you want to send mix 5 to more than one place, you can simply tell the mixer to patch it to the MY card slot in addition to the normal mix output.
I picked-out three MY cards for the 5D. In addition to the MY8ADDA, we got a CobraNet card and the MY 16AE AES I/O card.
The CobraNet card is very handy if you have a computer network around. We are fortunate enough to have a gigabit backbone in our facility and some IT guys who are not adverse to sharing some of their bandwidth with the audio guy. I got them to carve us out a VLan and I have a couple Whirlwind boxes that allow me to get the audio in and out of the Cobranet. We created a little network of our own around the control room and by connecting the feed that the IT guys gave me, I can ship up to 16 channels to and from just about anywhere on the Dome/convention center/park campus. That's a powerful tool, if you ask me. This stuff is all pretty new to us at the moment though so we're reserving judgement until we have used it for a while. I'll be pretty disappointed if we don't find that the CobraNet stuff performs reliably. Given my desire to have total reliability, anything that gives us problems usually ends up on a shelf before long.
The MY16AE has been somewhat of a disappointment so far. The disappointment isn't really the cards fault though as it stems from my limited understanding of the whole sample rate/sync/AES/Word clock world. I have a few digital audio devices in the control room that I figured I'd be able to plug into the AES card. What I failed to realize was that these CD/DAT/MD players and the Instant Replay all pretty much want to run on their own internal clock. If you make the Instant Repay the master, the mixer is fine with that but the CD players won't sync-up. If you change the clock to the CD player, the Instant Replay is grumpy. Even if I hook-up the one CD player that accepts it to the mixer's word clock output, I have to change from 48K to 44.1 to get it to sync-up and then the CobraNet card isn't happy. It's all kind-of a pain. We ended-up putting the two CD players and the Instant Replay on the 2 track Digital inputs of the mixer because they have sample rate conversion. At this point, I'm not sure what I'll be able to use the MY16AE card for. I'm hoping I'll be able to use it when we're re-fitting the video control room next year.
That's it for now. The first game is next weekend so maybe I'll have some notes from that. It took us quite a while to get the mixer set-up in a mix for the NFL games. The differences in the new mixer prompted a number of changes and there were many decisions to make.
CW
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Trouble Shoot
Over the last few days we've been very busy.
We had contractors in house re-locating seventeen Soundweb boxes (which means new wires and about 1500 connections), we've been re-configuring things in the control room to accommodate the new PM5D, the construction projects are winding down, there were several events and internal meetings in the building, and we're trying to get ready for the impending football season. We've also had our share of problems.
One of the things that any audio guy needs to know is how to troubleshoot a problem. If you think the sound should come out and it's not, you gotta figure out why. Sometimes you have time to figure that out but it can just as easily happen during the show when the producer or director is shouting something about your overall IQ and family history. You have to have troubleshooting chops to be a good sound guy.
The first step to figure out why your gear isn't doing what you want is figuring out what you know. While that sounds pretty easy, it can often be the hardest part of fixing your problem. It's all too easy to make assumptions based on past experience and those assumptions can lead you on false paths. You know that mic works because you just used it yesterday, right? Prove it. If you can't prove something you think you know, you don't really know it.
You have to think of the system you're checking in terms of signal flow. The sound comes out of some device like a mic or a CD player, travels through some wires and probably some other devices, and then ends in a recorder or falls out of some speakers. You've got to know where you can check the signal or at least see it on a meter. If you can chop the signal path into smaller pieces, it's easier to figure out where the trouble is. You can put the mic cable into a headphone amp, cue the bus you think you're sending the signal out of the mixer on, or see the signal light on the amps for example.
The best approach when troubleshooting is to simplify. The venerable KISS principle is your friend when you're trying to prove that stuff is or isn't working like it should. Are there devices or connections you can remove from the signal chain? Simple circuits have fewer possible points of failure, plain and simple.
I know I said that you really can't assume anything works but you've been around a while and you know that some stuff breaks more often than other stuff. You're probably going to start off by replacing that mic cable, for instance. That's probably a good move since we know that it's more likely to be the problem than the sm57 it's attached to. So you're going to make some assumptions based on your experience but keep in the back of your mind that your A2 might just have dropped that 57 off the golf cart last week... you never know, right?
One assumption I generally make is that it's my fault. I usually think about what I did last. What did I touch? Did I wiggle a cable by accident? Did I hook it up right? Is the selected channel the one I *think* I'm working on? :) (digital mixing update: I EQed the heck out of the wrong channel this weekend wondering all the while why it wasn't doing anything much to fix my slight ring...). In this assumption, I'm right pretty often.
One of the few things I remember from my high school auto shop class is never to assume that something works just because it's new. I've seen new cables with shorts, new power supplies that don't work, new microphones that sound like poo, etc. Always treat new stuff just like anything else. It's junk until you see/hear it working.
What I'm trying to say is that it's OK to make assumptions as long as you know that they are just that, you realize that you might need to go back and prove them out, and you have good reason for them.
You need a few tools to troubleshoot audio issues. Here is a by no means complete list of things that make finding out what's wrong just a bit easier:
A pair of headphones and a decent headphone amp make it much easier to unhook a cable to check for audio.
The Whirlwind Qbox is pretty great for this type of work. It's not great for critical listening but the tone generator and integrated speaker make this box a must for almost any audio job.
A tone/pink noise generator if good to have.
an ipod is good to have as a sound source. It's a good idea to have some speech program (podcast or audio book) loaded into the ipod so you can have somebody talking for a while without making your A2 really grumpy.
You really need a bag of adapters so you can change XLR sex, go to bare wires or well, whatever.
A multi-meter, of course
A known-good mic is a nice thing to have with you. A condenser mic is decent addition too. It's good to know if you can actually provide phantom power.
Some basic hand tools are necessary. You know, wire strippers, screwdrivers, knife, soldering iron with some clamps for holding wires, that kinda stuff.
So keep it simple, know what you know, understand your signal flow, and take a minute (even in the heat of battle) to *think* about what's going on and make a plan to fix it. I've never once found that taking a minute to breath a couple times and think through the situation was a waste of time.
Good luck.
We had contractors in house re-locating seventeen Soundweb boxes (which means new wires and about 1500 connections), we've been re-configuring things in the control room to accommodate the new PM5D, the construction projects are winding down, there were several events and internal meetings in the building, and we're trying to get ready for the impending football season. We've also had our share of problems.
One of the things that any audio guy needs to know is how to troubleshoot a problem. If you think the sound should come out and it's not, you gotta figure out why. Sometimes you have time to figure that out but it can just as easily happen during the show when the producer or director is shouting something about your overall IQ and family history. You have to have troubleshooting chops to be a good sound guy.
The first step to figure out why your gear isn't doing what you want is figuring out what you know. While that sounds pretty easy, it can often be the hardest part of fixing your problem. It's all too easy to make assumptions based on past experience and those assumptions can lead you on false paths. You know that mic works because you just used it yesterday, right? Prove it. If you can't prove something you think you know, you don't really know it.
You have to think of the system you're checking in terms of signal flow. The sound comes out of some device like a mic or a CD player, travels through some wires and probably some other devices, and then ends in a recorder or falls out of some speakers. You've got to know where you can check the signal or at least see it on a meter. If you can chop the signal path into smaller pieces, it's easier to figure out where the trouble is. You can put the mic cable into a headphone amp, cue the bus you think you're sending the signal out of the mixer on, or see the signal light on the amps for example.
The best approach when troubleshooting is to simplify. The venerable KISS principle is your friend when you're trying to prove that stuff is or isn't working like it should. Are there devices or connections you can remove from the signal chain? Simple circuits have fewer possible points of failure, plain and simple.
I know I said that you really can't assume anything works but you've been around a while and you know that some stuff breaks more often than other stuff. You're probably going to start off by replacing that mic cable, for instance. That's probably a good move since we know that it's more likely to be the problem than the sm57 it's attached to. So you're going to make some assumptions based on your experience but keep in the back of your mind that your A2 might just have dropped that 57 off the golf cart last week... you never know, right?
One assumption I generally make is that it's my fault. I usually think about what I did last. What did I touch? Did I wiggle a cable by accident? Did I hook it up right? Is the selected channel the one I *think* I'm working on? :) (digital mixing update: I EQed the heck out of the wrong channel this weekend wondering all the while why it wasn't doing anything much to fix my slight ring...). In this assumption, I'm right pretty often.
One of the few things I remember from my high school auto shop class is never to assume that something works just because it's new. I've seen new cables with shorts, new power supplies that don't work, new microphones that sound like poo, etc. Always treat new stuff just like anything else. It's junk until you see/hear it working.
What I'm trying to say is that it's OK to make assumptions as long as you know that they are just that, you realize that you might need to go back and prove them out, and you have good reason for them.
You need a few tools to troubleshoot audio issues. Here is a by no means complete list of things that make finding out what's wrong just a bit easier:
A pair of headphones and a decent headphone amp make it much easier to unhook a cable to check for audio.
The Whirlwind Qbox is pretty great for this type of work. It's not great for critical listening but the tone generator and integrated speaker make this box a must for almost any audio job.
A tone/pink noise generator if good to have.
an ipod is good to have as a sound source. It's a good idea to have some speech program (podcast or audio book) loaded into the ipod so you can have somebody talking for a while without making your A2 really grumpy.
You really need a bag of adapters so you can change XLR sex, go to bare wires or well, whatever.
A multi-meter, of course
A known-good mic is a nice thing to have with you. A condenser mic is decent addition too. It's good to know if you can actually provide phantom power.
Some basic hand tools are necessary. You know, wire strippers, screwdrivers, knife, soldering iron with some clamps for holding wires, that kinda stuff.
So keep it simple, know what you know, understand your signal flow, and take a minute (even in the heat of battle) to *think* about what's going on and make a plan to fix it. I've never once found that taking a minute to breath a couple times and think through the situation was a waste of time.
Good luck.
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