We all know that stuff breaks at the most inopportune times. Currently, I’m flying solo in the production department and my favorite video switcher decides to go on the fritz. I don’t know if you guys are like me or not, but I just can’t leave well enough alone. Just not smart enough to follow the old “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” saying. I decide that this was a prime time to clean up the video racks, a project that has been on the list for a while. This turned out to be never ending project that ended up eating all of my week and most of my weekend. As of tonight, I’m very happy with the results.
Most of the work that was done had to do with cables routed on the outside of the rack. Yes you know what I’m talking about, the cables that get thrown in last minute with the intent of cleaning them up later. The Video booth just seems to attract these kind of cable runs. Most of the time I consider myself in the middle of the road on cable routing. Definitely not the most anal person that I have ever met, but I do like clean cabling. The cabling in these racks certainly made me understand how detrimental sloppy cabling could be. I think that a root canal might be more fun then debugging issues in these racks.
So it is beautiful now, right? Well not yet, but we made big headway and removed 99.9 of the poorly routed cable. We also removed about 50% of the cables inside the racks. Yes there is still much work to do inside, but we made it 100% easier to find issues in the racks. Next week I think that I’m going to tackle underneath the desk at the front of the booth. May the force be with us.
This week we are installing a couple of new DSP units in the worship center. BSS London Blue 80s are the new brains for our audio system. In the process of testing everything last night we found the the protection circuits are bad in three of our EAW MH-662iA speakers. This has been limiting some of the high frequencies from the main center cluster. Now we have to figure out how to fix them. So again I will be excited to hear what the system is going to sound like after we get this fixed and our system tuner James Young is done with the DSP upgrade and room tuning. Going to be a fun Sunday.
