.. not really. I'm the sound designer and board op for our schools production of MacBeth. Our theatre has two mid/high speakers and a subwoofer infront of the proscenium but I also wanted to place some loudspeakers in the upper balcony.
Now, the way we have our main audio system set up, our Mackie's main outs directly go to our two main amps that power the main speakers. Four of our mackie's six aux sends are plugged into two more amps, whos outputs go to a little switchpanel that lets us assign certain amplified aux sends to one or two of any 12 speaker jacks located throughout our theatre.
The thing is though, there are no speaker jacks in our balcony, so we had someone come in who wired our switchpanel so we could assign aux sends to bare wires comming out of the back of the main rack isntead of to speaker jacks. We wired these up to two quarter-inch cables, threw them out the soundbooth window, and pulled them around into the upper balcony.
Because one of the cables didn't reach all the way from the soundbooth to the oposite end of the upper balcony, we used a 1/4" barrel connector to attach another cable to it and lengthen it so it'd reach the far speaker.
When I assigned Aux1 to Balcony-house-right and sent a signal, the balcony-house-right spekeaker worked fine.
However, when I unassigned that and assigned Aux 1 to balcony-house-left and sent a signal, nothing came out of the left speaker, but audio DID come out of the right speaker. This lead us to belive there was a wiring problem.
Another student tech and I spent seven hours troublehooting this.. we replaced cable, we re-wired some stuff in the back of our main amp rack, tried different aux assignments, and still nothing.
As sort of a little test at 7:00 PM, we werent really expecting anything, but we moved the left monitor to the middle of the balcony where the barrel connector was used to extend our cable. we took off the barrel connector and extra cable and plugged the shorter cable directly into the monitor. Having aux-1 assigned to the left speakerk and aux2 assigned to the right, it all worked perfectly.
Here's the kicker -- I unplugged the left monitors cable, then plugged JUST the bare barrel connector onto it... and audio would start playing out of the RIGHT speaker!
so anyways... I learned something yesterday.. Don't use cheap radioshack 1/4" barrel connectors, use nice beefy metal ones.
Now, the way we have our main audio system set up, our Mackie's main outs directly go to our two main amps that power the main speakers. Four of our mackie's six aux sends are plugged into two more amps, whos outputs go to a little switchpanel that lets us assign certain amplified aux sends to one or two of any 12 speaker jacks located throughout our theatre.
The thing is though, there are no speaker jacks in our balcony, so we had someone come in who wired our switchpanel so we could assign aux sends to bare wires comming out of the back of the main rack isntead of to speaker jacks. We wired these up to two quarter-inch cables, threw them out the soundbooth window, and pulled them around into the upper balcony.
Because one of the cables didn't reach all the way from the soundbooth to the oposite end of the upper balcony, we used a 1/4" barrel connector to attach another cable to it and lengthen it so it'd reach the far speaker.
When I assigned Aux1 to Balcony-house-right and sent a signal, the balcony-house-right spekeaker worked fine.
However, when I unassigned that and assigned Aux 1 to balcony-house-left and sent a signal, nothing came out of the left speaker, but audio DID come out of the right speaker. This lead us to belive there was a wiring problem.
Another student tech and I spent seven hours troublehooting this.. we replaced cable, we re-wired some stuff in the back of our main amp rack, tried different aux assignments, and still nothing.
As sort of a little test at 7:00 PM, we werent really expecting anything, but we moved the left monitor to the middle of the balcony where the barrel connector was used to extend our cable. we took off the barrel connector and extra cable and plugged the shorter cable directly into the monitor. Having aux-1 assigned to the left speakerk and aux2 assigned to the right, it all worked perfectly.
Here's the kicker -- I unplugged the left monitors cable, then plugged JUST the bare barrel connector onto it... and audio would start playing out of the RIGHT speaker!
so anyways... I learned something yesterday.. Don't use cheap radioshack 1/4" barrel connectors, use nice beefy metal ones.