[Ardour-Users] Ardour 2.8.5 released

[John Rigg]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 01:47:10PM -0500, Al Thompson wrote:
> In a live situation, if you can't get to things in time, or if something
> crashes, there you are.  You can try explaining to the 10,000
> metal-heads why it sounds like doo-doo, or (if the console has crashed)
> why they can't hear anything at all, but I don't think they'll care much.

On one of my first pro mixing gigs, on the second gig of my first ever tour,
the digital speaker management system on the Meyer PA system suddenly
went wrong and sent nothing but a narrow band of high mids to the main
speakers. This resulted in screaming feedback which would have blown
something up if I hadn't reacted quickly. All I could do was pull down
the main faders and rely on the fact that the on-stage monitors were
extremely loud so the audience could still hear the band to some extent.

Over 5000 rock fans, many of whom had been drinking all day, were looking
at me instead of the band. Many were letting me know how they felt.

Every time I slowly pushed the faders back up I could hear the feedback
returning. After a minute or so the fault disappeared and everything
was back to normal. That minute felt like an hour. I had to use the
same PA for several more gigs. It didn't go wrong again, but using
a system with an intermittent fault that could return at any time
did not make me happy.

This kind of incident is every live sound engineer's nightmare,
and the reason why I keep banging on about reliability of equipment.

John