Thursday 03/10/2022
Yesterday afternoon, Gerald, one of the IT staff people, emailed to say that a technician from the auditorium system vendor would come by at 8am today to diagnose the problem with the wireless mics. Would I like to be there? Well, duh.
So first thing I was in the auditorium. The tech was informative and helpful. Unfortunately his diagnosis was that our mixer board was failing and it wasn’t part of the system they had sold. Nobody is quite sure how old it is or when it was bought. He didn’t want to open it up and look; just advised replacing it. Warned that it might fail further, different mics cutting out, maybe during a performance.
He was able to help in another way, though. The whole system runs in one of two modes, auto or manual. In auto mode the mixer board is completely bypassed, and all the mics work. Unfortunately, the only way we had to capture the sound signal, the combination of all mics, for a zoom session, was via the MON jack on the mixer board. So for a hybrid zoom we had to run in manual mode, in which case, some of the mics were dying in the board.
But the tech spent quite a bit of time modifying the system so he could bring out the audio feed in auto mode, so we could do a hybrid zoom without the mixer board.
It’s my personal plan that next week, after the three (3!) upcoming hybrid zoom events, I’m going to take my tools some late night and open that mixer up. Look for the spider nest or leaking capacitor or whatever is causing the problem.
Around 1pm I drove down to FOPAL, checked my shelves prior to the sale weekend, and did a pre-sale count.
Later in the day I printed two more pictures for my picture rails. There are people who walk the halls for exercise and more than one has told me they like finding new pictures.
At 7:30 I went down to listen to classical music by five young musicians from the Music@Menlo organization. They were very skilled, which is no surprise as they are mostly graduates of Julliard and pursuing advanced degrees at various universities.
Codgerville 