ClearCom Problem

[mstaylor]

Last night I did Eric Church and I had my guys set up headsets for spots. They were having trouble so I went up to troubleshoot. Long story short, I changed out a cable and all was good. We go to start the first warmup and no houselights com. I thought I had a solution so I swapped the show hookup that was going to my dryline and the houselights head set. I had nothing to the spots but I did have houselights to LD. I restored to the original wire configuation, nothing worked. We swapped out all my beltpacks and headsets for the show's gear. Everything worked fine.
I am assuming I have a short in a beltpack that is taking the system down. The show guy thought it was because my gear is two different generation and his is the newest. He says that his new stuff doesn't like playing nice with my older gear.
Should I start looking for a gremelin or look at buying newstuff?

 

[Dover]

It might not be an either-or decision, you may need new equipment anyway. But I think if you do not find the cause of this problem and operate under the assumption that those two versions do not mix, then you will doomed to cart around two sets of belt packs "just in case". At least that is what my paranoia would make me do.
As for two generations of the Clear-Com "not playing nice" I find it hard to electrically justify,the signal is just 3 wires +24, Ground, and audio, there is no data or communication going between packs. However a difference in belt pack power draw is quite likely. With that in mind it is possible that if the older packs needed more current that the LD did not have enough headroom left on his power supply. I do think this scenario to be unlikely but it is the only thing that I can think of that could be described as "not playing nice". A call to Clear-Com might help clear this up one way or the other.
A more likely option is that you may have a bad connector in a belt pack that is only making intermittent contact and taking down the rest of the chain with it (I am assuming the belt packs in question were dasychained). That is where I would start looking.
Any more information you could provide about the system would be helpful.

Hope this helps
Dover

 

[Chris15]

I think if you'd stuck around long enough the show guy might have tried to sell you some snake oil...

Suspect gremlin.
Troubleshoot and resolve same and then if you're unsure whether it will work with the new gear have a chat to a dealer who'd love to sell you a new one about a demo and check the interface to your current (repaired) system...

 

[museav]

I am assuming I have a short in a beltpack that is taking the system down. The show guy thought it was because my gear is two different generation and his is the newest. He says that his new stuff doesn't like playing nice with my older gear.

He knows that to be a fact or was assuming it?

Should I start looking for a gremelin or look at buying newstuff?

Look for gremlins or simple issues. It it is a hardware issue it could also be something as simple as their having a large number of users and their gear having a more robust power supply or requiring less power per user.

 

[derekleffew]

mstaylor, does your house system use

RS-100

,
or
RS-501

,
or
other beltpacks?

 

[mstaylor]

My oldest ones are the RS-100. The newer ones are black but not the RS-501. I will look around and see if I can find a picture. I am leaving for three days to do the national tour of Fiddler so I can't check. I couldn't see how his newer version would be different unless the power supplied had changed. I didn't want to argue, it was a middle of the show fix, but I was skeptical. Our newer but still old may be Beyer beltpacks.
What he had. RS-601

 

[Tex]

FWIW, I have 501's and 601's playing nicely together every day.
I don't have any 100's, but I kind of wish I did. Those things look indestructible.

 

[mstaylor]

FWIW, I have 501's and 601's playing nicely together every day.
I don't have any 100's, but I kind of wish I did. Those things look indestructible.

They are, I bought them in 1981.

 

[MNicolai]

I work regularly on a system with 501's and 601's and haven't seen any problems aside from user error.

I do remember a Telex system a couple years ago going down because of a bad cable. Two wires were crossed in a cable and when the Telex system realizes that, it kills the system after about a minute. So you think everything is working fine and dandy, then go away and someone complains it's broken so you go fix it. Then you replug it, it works again and seems fine, so you walk away. They complain again.

Wash/rinse/repeat a half-dozen times before you vaguely remember a conversation with an install tech about how the Telex systems have a self-protection feature where they shut down when they see a bad cable in the chain. Don't know if that's the problem here, but it's the first thing I look for when I'm on a Telex system that's not playing nicely.

Found the bad cable, swapped it with a new cable, and chopped the end off of the bad one so I'd remember to fix it and not accidentally use it again. New cable worked like a charm and the system's been fine since.

 

[BobHealey]

I've mixed RS-501, Production Intercom, and RS-100 on a RS-100 vintage power supply; RS-501 and RS-601 on an RS-501 vintage supply; and RS-502, RS-602, Production Intercom, and a 3rd brand I can't remember on a 4 line system with 1 base station RS-502 vintage and the other an older whatever the 3rd brand is power supply. I think I might have used RS-601, RS-501, and RS-100 together, but can't remember, since people avoid using the RS-60x packs due to their tendency for the belt clips to snap off and general cheap feel.

 

[blalew]

Hoping this contributes something to this thread - we have Telex audiocom sets and we lost com partway into a show on the entire channel. Thankfully the show was a preview. Anyway, we had hay on the stage in one of the scenes & with all the sweeping, the end of a guitar string or paperclip or suchlike was swept into our floorboxes, whereupon it shorted across the XLR pins that provided com. Took a while to find it and it was after the show, but we were ready by the next night.

 

[josh88]

also if it helps, the last venue I was in had all 3 of those types of clearcom packs and they all worked fine with each other.

 

[mstaylor]

I finally looked at my newer coms, they are Production Intercom. I think the problem was they were supplying power but we have to use my base as a wireway. I disconnect power to make sure it doesn't accidently turned on but jumping it out is a pain. The moron that installed the system took a two channel base and wired one side of the arena to channel one and the other side to to channel two. That means I now have a one channel base and all kinds of homeruns coming to it. To jump it out I have to use a bunch of twofers to connect the sides. Then I have a third feed that drylines to the floor to either houselights or show.

 

[bishopthomas]

Don't you love those ever so knowledgeable installers that come in and botch the job before you have a chance to tell them how dumb they are? I feel like I'm constantly asking myself, "Why would they ever do this?" Like a massive (and complicated) Aviom rig with an M7CL just so they could use a "digital snake." I guess they didn't get the memo that there was an M7CL-ES so I get to figure out how to make all this crap play nice together... I feel your pain.