Show Stopper

[RandyHyde]

I just had my first show stopper problem in two years.
I was running four monitor mixes (with Mon 1 as the master) plus FOH. Some singers stepped away from their monitors for an extended solo and I muted their monitors (we were fighting feedback through them all night). The output on all channels, including FOH, were muted by this operation. All in front of about 3,000 people. Needless to say, it was a bit embarrassing as it probably took us 10-20 seconds to figure out what went wrong.

Don't know how to reproduce the problem, just thought I'd mention that it happened to us.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde

[mojogil]

I had one this weekend too. I run my show from a Dell M400 Laptop, I hadn't noticed that the power cable came unplugged until I got a message that the battery was almost dead. When I plugged in the power supply the screen froze and the audio got really quiet and buzzy. I re-booted and it was fine, but quite embarrassing.

[hkmorgan87]

Did you accidentally control + click on the master output?

@mojogil. I had a very similar issue this weekend. The promoter decided to plug some beer coolers into my distro, which I didn't know about. Which put me at or over the power limit on the generator. Voltages were dropping so low that my laptop would switch between battery and power. Ultimately the laptop froze and I had to restart. I don't think it's a bug in sac but more than likely aproblem with windows.

[mojogil]

I also assumed this is a windows thing, but I'll have to spend some time with it and see if there is a quicker recovery from it.

[nHaskin]

Randy,
Were your output mutes set to mute through?

Ned

[RandyHyde]

Randy,
Were your output mutes set to mute through?

Ned

No, and I don't think that muting monitor 3 should cause FOH to mute under that condition, anyway.

It may very well have been a computer glitch; as I said I'm not going to try to recreate the problem. Just throwing it out to see if anyone else has seen this.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde

[Butch Bos]

Hi Randy
What did you have to do to fix it
Did it still show meter movement
did you have to reboot

Butch

[Eric White]

Hi Randy,

Were you muting from a hardware controller or just mixing with a mouse?

-Eric

[AKHarris]

I could be wrong, but this sounds like "solo in place" option was selected, and a solo button rather than mute may have been accidently selected.

I remember testing this extensively at home trying to learn correct solo porcedures. SIP would kill everything.

[RandyHyde]

Hi Randy
What did you have to do to fix it
Did it still show meter movement
did you have to reboot

Butch

Had to unmute everything.
The big problem was figuring out what caused the show to go dark. Given the circumstances of two weeks ago, the first thing we looked at was all the breakers on the power distribution box. Finally, I switched off the monitor view I was on and noticed that all the other outputs were muted, too.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde