I'm thinking that it's bad practice to
send an amplified signal down a low-impedance
snake, but I don't have a reference for such thought. Can someone please
point me in the right direction?
We have an 8-ch Whirlwind mic
snake, and one of our techs connected an
amplifier to one end and a
speaker at the other (with various
XLR to 1/4 connectors). I wanted to confront him about it but he's the type of guy who will need reference in order to accept that he is wrong. Or, maybe I'm wrong!!
Thanks!
I'm still not sure I understand your problem. You're saying the tech put
speaker level on a low-z
channel which implies a balanced run.
Speaker level is not balanced, but if your tech is using a low-z balanced run at
speaker level, what's to stop you from putting
line level into that same
snake channel and putting your amp on
stage? Or a powered
speaker for that matter? It's already been established that it's not a good idea, why is it not possible to reposition the amp?
You're mentioning controlling the volume from the booth, but like
@FMEng said, typically you don't alter the amp attenuation once set. That only affects the input side anyways, how much
line level it takes to drive the amp essentially. If you've got a
mixer and you're continually setting volume at the amp, that is a woefully incorrect way of operating. If your amp output and your speakers are matched then most of the time I see people running wide open and attenuating at the board. This is tricky though because it does allow the possibility of damaging your
speaker and amp. There are other schools of thought with regard to setting attenuation at the amp, but that really depends mostly on what amp/
speaker combo you have. I've never seen anyone outside of someone plugging a mic directly into an amp using the input
gain to adjust volume on the fly.
Depending on the length of the run, you will garner noise running
line level down unbalanced runs.
Can you list out all your input requirements, your output requirements, and the available channels of balanced and unbalanced runs between your
desk and the
stage? I'm just not picturing this. You said the
snake doesn't reach the
stage from the booth, but some channels are patched into your hardwired mic lines?