So I after buying my DL1608 last year and basically working a lot of smaller gigs where it was really convenient to not have to run a snake or mix from stage and wander back and forth to tweak all night long I finally got around to my first weekend of decent sized gigs.
I was given the job of running sound at one of the venues at Tulsa's Center of the Universe festival, four bands over two nights. I used a total of four tops, two subs, three powered wedges, and with one band with an IEM for the lead vocalist.
Most all bands had the same set up, kick, snare, rack, floor, bass, two guitars, keys or acoustic, and 2 to 3 vocal mics so typically 11 - 12 channels.
I was running an Airport Express for my access point/switch as I was also running Luminair with an Enttec DMX interface for lighting.
Technically I had zero issues other than at one point the number of bodies in the venue started absorbing too much of the wifi signal as it was sitting on the floor of the stage. In the future if I get this gig again I will have to look at raising the location of the AP to keep it more line of sight. I never lost my connection once but as the venue reached capacity I could see some latency in the meters at times.
Unfortunately I have to beat a dead horse because they issues I had were the typical ones we all complain about.
When I have an aux set to pre I don't want my EQ's going to the monitors, it was a constant battle with the wedges on a very confined staged. I run a DBX AFS-224 and rang out the stage ahead of the main performance but there is no way to set presets on the AFS-224 like you can on the 1608 so when I had s couple of singers bring their own mics (one being a really hot Beyerdynamic) and it was battle because I had to tone one down significantly due to the exaggerated sibilance on it yet he liked the brightness on stage. It's really frustrating to have to be conservative about adjustments in the main mix adjustments knowing that what I'm doing is skewing the stage monitors too.
Tempo tap was an issue not being able to access it from the main screen.
Considering I wasn't using all 16 channels being able to hide unused channels would have been nice to cut down on the side-to-side scrolling getting down to the effects faders.
I can't believe I never accidentally hit a mute button getting to the EQ, a first for me but I still think the placement is poor.
While I didn't have any stereo feeds at this show I normally do for my other shows and stereo linking is still a sore spot for me.
Some muting options would also be nice, maybe on the title bar like 4 muting groups on side and the effects short cut / tempo tap on the other side
Overall the shows went very well and the bands were happy with everything I just wish I had a little more confidence in my mixing freedoms because the monitor/aux issues continue to restrain my options for the main mix
