I have read a bit about live sound recently, and I keep wondering why it would make sense to put a DI box between the output of a sub-mixer which already outputs a balanced signal and the FOH mixing desk? It probably doesn’t hurt and may by standard practice in venues, but I struggle to understand its purpose.
They’re not fully necessary, soundguys just tend to play it safe though. Plus you get a ground lift on most DIs which can be very useful.
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In a perfect world, you don’t need it, but:
- the balanced inputs on some mixers have a hard time with the hot line level signal coming out of the onstage mixer
- as mentioned, there might be ground-loops between the two mixers causing nasty hums. DI’s have ground-lift switches for that purpose.
- if the house mixer is accidentally sending out phantom power it can fry the output of your mixer, the DI protects you from that.
- the world isn’t perfect
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Hey again, so it’s an outdoor gig and they’re asking for sound volume, whats the decibel range i should work with? Idm/jungle/ambient stuff.
Sorry if this is noob sorta question.
That’s what the sound tech is responsible for and if there is none then the person who has access to the PA and that’s usually not the person performing so it seems a kinda odd question to ask you from their side.
That being said there are some restrictions on what constant sound level is allowed for public events and that differs from country to country. And if there are restrictions then usually a limiter takes care of that unless the promoter wants to risk the event being shut down. Bottomline is: after you‘ve done a proper gain staging and send a clean signal the rest is out of your hands and not your responsibility.
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Bought a 12 input mixer, I feel better about all this now. Cleaner signal vs sending the polyend tracker through the digitone.