“I dunno, it worked in the shop, I swear.” How many times have I heard this? Too many. Gear may work fine in the shop, but did you actually physically attach all the pieces that will work with it at the actual gig, or did you just assume? I have seen opto-splitters light up and look great when plugged in at a bench. Looks like they are passing DMX, but when I get on site they are actually kaput. If you didn’t test it by actually setting up the system entirely as you would on the road, how do you know? You won’t. And I bet you will pay wholeheartedly for your decision to save those three minutes one day… But I have a bigger gripe than just having a bad circuit in a multi cable. And that’s having a bent connector on a cable (making it extremely hard to plug in) show up on the first day. Of course, every tech wishes the guys in the shop would test their cables ahead of time to weed out these nuisance connectors. But if you did not plug them in and see them work while you were prepping your show, it’s on you. You left the shop with crappy connectors, and now we have to fix them on the road.
—From “LD-at-Large” by Nook Schoenfeld, PLSN, Dec. 2013
