Surface Lockup – S5000 – 1.62

[JayParticipant]

DM64, S-5000 with Dante & Waves, Ver 1.62, No Roles

During system alignment, surface local audio in from a SMAART rig, I lost audio for 45 seconds. During this outage the surface (faders, layers, LCD, values, etc) all appeared to work fine but appeared to have no effect. Audio returned, but there was no control from the surface and neither display would respond.

Hard restart of the surface and everything returned to normal. Sound check and the show ran fine (with a little anxiety).

Looking at the logs today (Mixrack log attached), you can see the Mixrack initial start at 14:48, restart at 16:50, and where I restarted the surface at 16:54:47 because it was connected (as the logs show) but not controlling it. On the 16:50 restart, only 1 GigaACE link reconnected, not 2. Both reconnected after surface restart. I can’t pull surface logs until I flip it tomorrow.

Two items different than my normal setup:

1) I was using house shielded Cat6 instead of my own snakes.

2) I observed an output patching anomaly between surface and mixrack outputs about 30 minutes prior to the restart.

Patching anomaly:
– Surface & Mixrack outputs are normally setup 1-5 as L/R/Sub/Front Fill/Delay for this particular show as I always use house PA.
– This venue was being fed from FOH and need an under-balcony delay, added to surface as output 6 from a mono matrix (delay 2).
– House guy got patching wrong – asked for Front/Delay 1/Delay 2 (4-6) but was Delay 1/Delay 2/Front. Easy re-patch on surface.
– Their front fills were blown, so we put ours out and patched from MR output 4.
– During the output test, they were patched with Delay 1.
– Reviewing the entire MR output patch, 1-6 matched the Surface patch I had just done. On a random chance from the past, I may have believed it, but the new delay 2 (it was an existing unused mono matrix) was in the middle of the patch and we had re-patched the surface “live” listening to the outputs so I wasn’t accidentally patching the MR.

This system has done about 30 shows in the last year ranging from Opera (broadcast & record) to Theatre and rock-n-roll, and this was the first time I’ve ever had a lack of confidence in how it was behaving.

Jay

[Author]

Posts