At the place I work, we have a DM64 for FoH/Mon and a digital split to a DM0 for Broadcast. I’ve got the “band” channels duplicated in the DM64 so that I don’t have to share channel processing for FoH & Monitors (as one does) and use tie lines to get the signal to the Broadcast MixRack. So, for instance, the socket with the kick mic gets patched to channel 1 for FoH, channel 91 for Monitors, and Slot 1/Channel 1 for the Broadcast system (they’re mostly just patched 1-1 from the split on Slot 1). This is all well & good & straight-forward, but it’s kinda annoying when the stage gets rearranged and I’ve gotta repatch everything. The patching needs to get updated in three places for every one change, and it’s pretty easy to forget about two of them when nobody’s on stage to tell me there’s bass in the ME’s acoustic guitar channel (plus, the broadcast booth is usually locked up when I’m making these changes so I can’t get into that room to verify stuff is coming up where it’s supposed to anyway).
Could we add an option in the I/O patchbay to set an input or tie line (or output, I suppose) to just copy from another specified channel instead of being assigned to a specific socket? That way I could set the 30 or so of my 40 monitor channels that are split from FoH to copy their input sockets from their equivalent FoH channel, and most of the tie lines could copy their input sockets from the relevant FoH channel as well. Seems like having a single “source of truth”, as they say in the software industry, would make things a lot easier for those of us whose patching isn’t static.