Audio/Video for Dummies

 Audio/Video for Dummies

Last week we (Jim and I) decided to hook up the Stage Box to our X32 Mixer, since we have one and the wireless mics were a lot of trouble. We arranged to meet at the church at 1:00 PM today to try to get the system going.

I prepared by reading all I could in the Manual, which is so esoteric I didn’t even have a clue about what they were trying to teach me. I watched training videos on YouTube, most of which assumed you already knew something about what you were doing. The longer I studied the more confused I was.

Instead of a simple demonstration of how to configure just one channel to get the sound to come through, they spent long minutes explaining how to string multiple stage boxes together in series, which would be fine for an orchestra, but we are just a small church in a small town in Texas.

When we first started to set up to stream the services when the pandemic started, we had one microphone which we couldn’t get any sound out of, even though it was brand new. We asked for help from a local business which gave lessons to church members for a price, but either they thought we were too dumb to teach, or they had some Baptist scruples about teaching those UU heretics down at the Red River Unitarian Universalist place. In any case they never called back.

After much searching, I found an article online about the difference between dynamic and condenser microphones. How were we supposed to know that condenser mics need 49 volts of “Phantom Power” to make them operate? Sure, everybody knows that! Except us. We bought some phantom power adapters with batteries inside that allowed us to stream the radio signal across the room to the receiver, which connects to the mixer board.

As Jim and I continued this afternoon to try to get sound out of the stage box, we listened to YouTube videos and tried to make sense of it.On one of the videos the teacher changed the clock setting from external to the stage box. I did that and then we had no sound at all from anywhere, including the Power Point computer. Jim suggested I change that setting back like it was before. Good idea!

 We figured it had something to do with “Routing”, but the page with the routing choices was long and complicated. Where are we routing from? Where are we routing to? Is the routing inside the box or the mixer? 

After an hour and a half of no luck, I took a break and went to the bathroom. When I came back, Jim was back by the stage box and said, “Listen to this!” He blew on the mike and the sound burst from the mixer. 

I asked what he did, and he showed me how he moved the routing from the stage box to the row of faders we wanted to use for those channels. He said we were overthinking it. He was right. It didn’t take us long to plug in the electric piano and several microphones and adjust the gains on each channel to unity on the faders. 

I know this is kind of technical for most people. Me most of all. But I’m beginning to think there is hope for me at last.

I went looking on Amazon for a book titled X32 Mixer for Dummies, but they don’t have it. They should.