The board was set up by a company many years ago. Since then the entire staff and team leaders have changed.
Most professional installs leave a bad taste in my mouth. I understand why they lock things down - customers mess with it, and then blame the company for a "bad product" - I saw that myself when I was in Industrial Controls for a while - but it also prevents a new local legitimate expert from fixing anything or adapting to a new set of requirements.
Better, in my experience (at least with media gear that doesn't ruin a few million dollars worth of material when someone screws it up), to provide an easy way to get back to the installed settings, and then leave it wide open. If you don't like what your tinkering ended up with, re-load how it was.
In fact, I do that automatically for the last 3 rigs that I've built. Digital board, and a computer that's on 24/7/365 except for a periodic scripted update and reboot. (so far, I've done it with 2 Raspberry Pi's running the official Raspberry Pi OS, and 1 Mini PC running Lubuntu Linux, both of which are based on Debian Linux, which makes the scripting part easy) That computer also watches for when the board has been off for at least 2 hours (more than a momentary power glitch) and then comes back on, and pushes a scene file into it that I built for that rig. So no matter how someone left it, the next person gets that standard. If you want to start with something different, you need to have saved it before, and load it again after the reset.
I think it'd be great if manufacturers would include that function natively as an option, but so far, I haven't seen it.
At this point, I probably know the most, which is not much, and I am trying to learn more and more to be as useful as I can be.
Great! Keep working at it!
But during services and events I am usually leading or playing guitar in the band, so I try to troubleshoot in the off times, and when things are happening live, I can't do anything, but try to "fix" it later. I've been coming in on my days off to try and tweak settings and learn more, but having no luck with this issue.
Is there someone else that can lead, maybe once a month, so you can run the board live? You'll only catch about 1/4 of the recurring problems that way, but the fix-once-and-done ones will eventually come up while you're on. For the other 3/4 of recurring problems, you'll also have better knowledge to tell the person running it how to fix it.
Just be careful about mixing from stage. You have no idea from there, how it sounds in the audience. For that, just trust your FOH Engineer, no matter what their experience level. That's also a respect thing...
Good to know we are a Little bit further along than where you are working now. I have these 3 lists. And especially since we had to upgrade the firmware on the board in order to get USB out for the new setup, I documented and took pictures of every screen and setting on the board, so if i had to rebuild it, i knew what the previous settings were.
Good! A lot of people just run through a major reconfiguration like that, perhaps blindly following some poorly written instructions or advice, and then panic when they find that their stuff isn't preserved.
If you are local to NJ, I would love for you to take a look! haha.
Kansas City. Sorry.
I am going to keep watching YouTube videos and learning more about the ins and outs of the board. I know enough to be dangerous, but I still consider myself a novice. I am a musician that knows a little bit about mixing and audio, but not enough to be the audio engineer or "sound guy", but for this instance, I need to learn it so I can then try to teach someone else who will then hopefully take it and run with it so I can focus on what I'm good at.
That's more-or-less how I got started. I played piano and trombone growing up, and absolutely hated the theory part. It was never connected to the fun pieces that I just hammered into my memory so I could "just play them".
Then much later, after we moved and didn't find another teacher, my new church youth group had a hand-me-down system that nobody understood, including me, so I just went back there and figured it out. Mackie SR24: the classic, cheap, ubiquitous, and weird analog console.
In the years after that, during and after college, I ate up all of the articles and videos that I could find about how to run a generalized audio rig *well*. It wasn't until many years of that, that I realized that THAT'S THEORY! The very thing that I hated growing up because it was just pounded into me in isolation, I was now seeking out and devouring.
I still don't like music theory - maybe a mild traumatic thing - but I still read articles and watch videos about technical media. And my musical background has helped me many times to anticipate where the band is going, so I can push it slightly for an exciting bit, or pull it back to settle down, or highlight a solo, or whatever. The mixing desk is its own instrument, and the person that runs it is just as much a part of the band as the people on stage. "Set and forget" is like swapping out the drummer for a drum machine, or using a backing track for a fairly major part.
Trying to just send the main mix to the Live Stream so what you hear in the sanctuary is the same as what you hear in the stream.
The main mix, and thus what comes out of the audience PA, is *not* what you hear in the room! It's missing what spills off the stage all by itself, and it's unavoidably compensated for what the room does to it, which is unique to that room.
The stream needs its own mix, with studio monitors or headphones, and it needs to include more than what the house mix does. When I first set up our drum mics, the drummer was adamant that we didn't need them. He could play to the room just fine, with no need for amplification, which was entirely true. He really is that good. But I needed them for the stream. When I explained that, he was okay. They didn't go to the house at all...until we had a particularly energetic song one Sunday, and I boosted the kick a little bit. :-)
Plus that whole bit about "live" vs. "mastered" and what it takes to do that.
We used to have a separate Laptop that ran OBS solely for the livestream...So when we had to upgrade the Mac to run ProPresenter7 we decided to just do everything on the Mac and cut out the laptop...
If you have the spare capacity, and you're not doing very much, that works. But I've found that "separation of duties" works wonders! Dedicated machine for each task, even if you do have enough spare capacity in one machine to fit something else.
Dedicated controls with no switching, optimized settings for each job, if one crashes the others keep going, etc. Lots of benefits, and the extra expense of a (good!) physical capture device to get one machine's content into another, is not that much by comparison.
...the audio was being sent by an extra Behringer P-16-M monitor. But depending on who was running the stream they would always mess with the mix in the monitor or turn it down so it sounded good in the headphones, but it sounded HORRIBLE on the stream. Sometimes they would accidentally mute channels, or solo one channel, and you had to turn the volume on your device to max in order to barely hear anything.
I've heard of people using a P16 to run the stream mix. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I think your problem was more that the operator didn't know the *actual* requirements to do it well, and/or didn't know what they were doing in the first place. Those problems are the same no matter what gear you use.
If they turn down *everyone's* volume to make their own personal headphones "right"...
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