Dimmer Beach

For the past two days at my theatre, I've been having a very slow heart attack. One of our 96 racks was intermittently deciding not to work, at all. It seemed particularly averse to working late nights (understandably). As we have a show opening tonight (which I'm designing lighting for), this was cause for concern. Half my systems weren't working, and I had no house lights. For hours, I looked at this CD-80 rack, frowning, and fucking with cables, and taking out cards, noting, nervously, that it was built in 1981. At least five people looked at this mess and shrugged.



The rack was on, and it was not communicating with the light board. Our other 96-rack was working just fine. So last night, I called my buddy Michael, who's very good with these types of things. He had me trace all the cables back, check out the opto splitter, and...the lights on the splitter were not on. Which meant that it wasn't getting power. Tracing the power cable back to its source, I found that it was hooked into the same circuit as our amps, which get shut down by our sound tech at the circuit breakers. So when the sound tech leaves, our CD-80 rack went bye-bye. The other rack still worked because it was plugged into the pass-through on the opto, which doesn't require power.

I guess the moral is: when in doubt, it's the dumbest, simplest possible solution you can think of.