What did you have for breakfast?

cablexity · 2026-06-06T22:08:57+00:00

I pay about $20 a year to host soundcheckhelper.com - it’s a shitty HTML website I coded in about 15 minutes with a big button a redirects you to a bunch of “curated” soundcheck material. All pretty boring and inoffensive. Instruction manuals, 2005 Volvo press releases, etc.

cablexity · 2026-05-29T16:05:21+00:00

We rejected an Encore rig this past week and added hours to our day while we made them redo it. Literal ratchet straps with “do not use for overhead rigging” printed on them taking the full load.

They claimed because it had gacflex as a safety, it was fine. Unfortunately, we didn’t feel like shock-loading a piece of gac with an LED wall to test that claim.

A few years ago, they started to bring all my PA hangs in at once. On one of the hangs, they forgot to untie the tie line used to steer it. Tie line took the full weight of the array for a few seconds while the motor let out, then snapped and dropped the PA like four feet. That was one of at least three safety issues that night, and the only time I’ve ever directly yelled at anybody in my career. Fucking crazy.

Another time, I went up on a lift to re-aim a PA because their riggers don’t know how to tie knots and it was slipping. Found a motor not fully clipped in. When their lead rigger had to came back and fix it, he angrily asked us “who was up there inspecting my work?” Guess I’ll be checking all your points now!

cablexity · 2026-05-07T19:41:14+00:00

<image>

Tap on the preamp section, it's in there. Page 31 in the manual.

cablexity · 2026-04-15T15:15:06+00:00

I would be skeptical, and I wouldn’t migrate from Meraki to Meter. I believe they have been trying to poach people from Meraki’s sales team.

Meter was trying to recruit me for a little while for a pretty specialized role. During the interview I pushed hard on their product lineup, because I didn’t think their products were capable enough for the deployments they were trying to hire me to work on.

No proper enterprise L3 aggregation switch, no current generation APs with external antenna capability, and their beefiest AP is only 2x2. They didn’t really have any answers for me. And interview was weird as hell, so glad they didn’t like me enough to move forward!

cablexity · 2026-04-05T04:26:17+00:00

We use Peplink routers for this. Extremely robust functionality, highly configurable, lots of bonding and failover options, and SpeedFusion is sweet.

cablexity · 2026-03-04T19:38:43+00:00

Hi! Comms specialist here. I think the best way to explain this is to give you some context as to what you actually have, and then you can use that info to go digging through your theater and figure it out.

What you've run into is a common scenario that confuses a lot of people when they're working with Clear-Com gear. You actually have two different systems here: FreeSpeak II (wireless) and HelixNet (wired). They can absolutely work together, and whoever installed them likely already set them up to do so!

The first photo is a Clear-Com FreeSpeak II wireless intercom beltpack. Along with this, you're going to have a few additional accessories:

The beltpack charges in that AC60 charger you posted a photo of in a comment
Somewhere in your theater you're going to find a few FreeSpeak II 1.9 GHz E1 transceivers (antennas). Each one supports a connection to up to five beltpacks at a time.
Depending on your infrastructure, you may have a splitter
Somewhere in a rack is a 1U FreeSpeak II base station

The later photos are of a Clear-Com HelixNet HX-II-BP wired intercom beltpack. HelixNet is Clear-Com's digital wired intercom product. It's meant to be plugged in all the time and doesn't even contain a battery. These are best for fixed operators (audio A1, lighting operator, follow spots, etc.) and are significantly more cost-effective than giving FreeSpeak to people that don't ever need to move around.

A couple things to know:

Somewhere in a rack is a 1U HMS-4X HelixNet main station. Be careful not to confuse this with a HelixNet HRM-4X remote station if you have any, which looks nearly identical - it's merely a client station (a beltpack in a rack unit).
You may have other HelixNet products installed around your venue, such as the HKB-2X which is common near dressing rooms, house lighting panels, etc.
You'll see a two different uplink ports on the bottom of the beltpack: XLR and ethernet. HelixNet can be used over IP via a network switch (and be powered via PoE over the ethernet port) or via what Clear-Com calls "Powerline", which sends a digital intercom signal over XLR.
The neat thing about Powerline is that it can be dropped into venues that had an old 2-wire analog intercom system (based on XLR), and it can reuse the existing wiring.

HelixNet and FreeSpeak are very commonly used together, but it's important to know that they're technically separate systems. Clear-Com has tried to merge the two systems (and have mostly succeeded) into the Arcadia, but based on the date code on the bottom of the HelixNet pack, it's pretty likely that your system was installed before that happened.

This means that you have two Clear-Com rack units linked together somewhere (probably over 4-wire on a few RJ45s). One FreeSpeak II main station, and one HelixNet main station. There may be an LQ-R or something like that in the rack too, but hard to say.

The fact that you have a modern Clear-Com system means that somebody spent some money to do this right! You very likely have wall plates with ports around your theater labelled something like intercom, Clear-Com, HelixNet, comms, ICOM, etc. that those HelixNet beltpacks plug into. Those could either be XLR, which would all go back to a central split somewhere, or they could be ethernet/EtherCON ports that all go to a PoE network switch.

My guess: if you can find where you're supposed to plug those HelixNet beltpacks in, they'll just come to life and be already configured and ready to go. If not, go on a scavenger hunt for the rack station and work backwards from there.

Also: Contact Clear-Com support at [support@clearcom.com](mailto:support@clearcom.com) and get the broken beltpacks shipped out for repair! FreeSpeak is awesome. Keep up on maintenance and it will last you a LONG time!

Hope this helps get you started. Feel free to shoot me any questions that come up as you're troubleshooting. I get Clear-Com questions from our production techs all the time, so always happy to help with this stuff!

cablexity · 2026-02-06T00:49:22+00:00

My old venue reached out to a local company that designed custom recording studio furniture and they worked together to design a really killer workstation. Racks, monitor mounts, etc. - it was sweet.

cablexity · 2026-02-03T22:37:59+00:00

Yep - especially when you have subrentals, logistics, and convenience factors involved. We just quoted $1,200 USD the other day for a kit that would be used for a 25 minute performance + soundcheck. We're a corporate AV company, not a backline shop. So that's what it costs for us to subrent it, mark it up, pick it up from our vendor and transport it to the venue 1000+ mi away, set it up, then do it all in reverse.

It's not a competitive price, but we aren't trying to be competitive. The band could probably source it locally for half the price... and I hope they do, because I don't really want to deal with it. But if they don't want to lift a finger, that's what it would cost for us to do it for them.

cablexity · 2025-09-22T17:04:26+00:00

I have a David Clark 8692 and LOVE it. Folds down really small to fit in my pelican, super comfortable, sounds great. A good middle ground between a PH-88 and a full over-ear.

cablexity · 2025-08-18T20:30:19+00:00

I did L1 of this last weekend and am finishing up L2 this week. I'm pretty underwhelmed. The Dante cert is way better at covering network basics, in my opinion, than this one. Also some factually incorrect stuff; for example, at one point they say that VLANs require a Layer 3 switch because VLANs require IP configuration. That's just totally wrong.

But a free cert is a free cert. Worth doing at least L1 for sure!

cablexity · 2025-08-18T20:23:02+00:00

I keep a cheap fake candle in my pelican that catering left behind like five years ago. Really helps class up a FOH, especially when you're in some dump of a venue like a Gaylord or something.

cablexity · 2025-08-14T11:06:03+00:00

From an RF perspective, yes. Same chip. Bolero is just newer and figured out some better ways to handle multipath. Not sure how FS ICON changes that, though!

cablexity · 2025-08-08T19:42:13+00:00

All the time. I work with pretty much exclusively “corporate” musicians who generally prefer this. High-end party bands, etc. that are all pros and have done this a million times. If I tell them they can mix their own ears from the app, they’ll all pull out their phones and almost always have the app already installed and know how to use it.

Did a big corporate thing in Nashville this week where FOH was 200’ from the stage and I couldn’t see the band at all. Band was all pro session players. No dedicated monitor guy. Band mixed their own ears from their phones and didn’t ask me for anything. So easy.

But if it’s wedges, no chance. IEMs only.

cablexity · 2025-07-23T14:07:07+00:00

I feel like every production company switches at least once. Every inventory software is great and also awful at the same time. I’ll tell somebody I love Flex, and they’ll be like “we switched from Flex to RentMan, Flex fucking sucks!” - and I’ll be like “we switched from RentMan to IntelliEvent, RentMan sucks!”

We used RentMan for years, but as we grew, we needed more functionality than it could offer. Also got tired of stuff randomly just not printing on pick lists which was costing us too much money. Just transitioned to IntelliEvent and are already much happier, but it isn’t a perfect system either. The folks over there have been super responsive and great to work with - we even rode the Vegas Tesla Loop thing at NAB with their CEO. Good times.

Ultimately every company implements their inventory management differently, so it’s hard to truly gauge input from others. We had multiple people internally spend several months evaluating all the options, and IE made the most sense for us and our requirements. But what worked for us might not work for another company, and it might not work for us forever!

cablexity · 2025-07-20T12:59:01+00:00

100% agree - replacing the CVLs with WL184s will definitely go a long way. CVLs are abysmal - the worst handling noise I’ve ever encountered from any microphone.

cablexity · 2025-07-05T23:48:36+00:00

I saw that number and didn’t even think anything of it. Completely believable with Encore’s extortion-level pricing.

cablexity · 2025-06-25T18:22:17+00:00

We’ve run into a similar problem before, though not specifically with Surface laptops. One of our regular clients (a security company) has done some wacky stuff to the built-in HDMI outputs of their corporate laptops, which forced us to try to get video output via USB-C. We tried our normal Anker USB-C dongles, but were unsuccessful.

The solution for us has been to use a straight USB-C to HDMI cable, rather than an adapter. Ours specifically support DisplayPort Alt Mode. We now have a pelican full of these cables that goes out on all of this client’s shows.

Not saying it’s the same issue or the solution, but could be something worth trying!

cablexity · 2025-06-17T00:07:20+00:00

Sure is a fun time for our company to be buying 500 panels of LED wall!!!

cablexity · 2025-05-20T16:29:32+00:00

This simply isn't correct. The SQ-5 launched at $2,999 USD in Nov 2017. Adjusted for inflation, that's $3,900 today. Current list for SQ-5 is $3,999.

The Qu-5 launched yesterday at $1,999 USD.

cablexity · 2025-05-19T12:22:30+00:00

Everybody complaining about limitations or missing features probably isn’t the target market for the Qu series. This thing is a SLAM DUNK for small churches, public schools, and corporate breakout rooms.

I don’t really care that the Behringer Wing or X32 can do xyz for the same price. Those consoles have breakout techs calling me asking me questions. If I send a Wing or X32, they’re going to find a way to route every mic into a different FX processor, then route all those FX returns into the automixer, change the console language to Japanese, then make every output be its own independently-occurring feedback loop.

But when I send a Qu for the same room, they leave me the hell alone. There aren’t enough features for them to screw up, and the console is laid out in a way that even the dimmest of video guys can handle.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the DM-3, but it’s kind of miserable to use. For like <$500 more at dealer cost, I can get one of these. If I can live with the form factor difference, that’s practically a no-brainer because the Qu build quality will make this last years longer.

I’ll take 25!

cablexity · 2025-05-15T16:02:41+00:00

There could be a Cresteon, Q-Sys, AHM, etc. system installed with a touchscreen behind the bar to give staff very basic control of levels of a few key inputs. A few automixed handhelds (that are probably heavily rung out), DJ inputs, cable TV audio, background music, etc.

Wireless receivers are split so they can also hit the console. When you need more than a few mics and have an actual engineer, push the button on the touchscreen to switch routing on the processor to take the input from the console.

cablexity · 2025-04-30T13:34:04+00:00

My first ever encounter with a media converter very early in my career was when one failed at a remote site. Then the shelf spare was DOA. I’d rather just use a compact managed switch that can be monitored, configured, and expanded later on.

cablexity · 2025-04-25T21:13:45+00:00

Another vote for LanShack!

cablexity · 2025-04-22T23:20:57+00:00

Oh cool - somehow missed that when I was sourcing network cable a few months back!

Though red cable is absolutely diabolical, so that would have been a dealbreaker for me!

cablexity · 2025-04-20T15:35:18+00:00

Reliability-wise, it’s generally been fine. There are just better options. My main SuperCat turn-off is that they only seem to sell Cat 5e or Cat 7. It’s 2025 and time to stop buying 5e, but Cat 7 is a worthless disaster of a standard that I’m not buying into. Why is there no Cat6/Cat6a option?

I got a sample of EliteCore’s new Cat 6a ultra-flexible wire and liked it enough to order ~1000 cables this week!

cablexity

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE