Monitor This

Or that. I really do not care for cheaply manufactured audio products for either studio or live installation. I lead the technical ministries at my church and I invariably troubleshoot all of the problems with the sound system. For whatever reason the monitor system was set up with both passive and active feeds. We send two discrete feeds to the passive system and another two discrete feeds to the active system. The passive system takes advantage of high quality amplifiers and stage wedges. The actives use cheap Yorkville “mixer amps”. These wedges try to do way more than what is needed from a stage monitor.

There are multiple inputs and outputs: mic preamp, line in, RCA in, EFX send and return, instrument in. There are two channels. There is eq and parallel signal output. However, to meet a price point, everything about this wedge is cheap. Cheap pots, cheap components, cheap speakers. So… how does it sound? Terrible. And that is when it works.

One of the wedges has developed an intermittent short. I took it apart last week and I could find no break in the circuit however I now suspect that the problem must reside in the actual jack itself. The jack is manufactured using the highest possible quality of plastic and the absolute minimum of conductive metal to transfer signal. And, to ensure the widest possible appeal of the product, the inputs must handle balanced and unbalanced connections.

Throw ’em out is what I would like to do. However, we have limited funds to deal with the monitor system.