I work at a large contemporary church in suburban St. Louis and ran FOH in our main auditorium for eight identical Easter services. Part of the service involved the band playing along to a timed video, which was being driven via an iMac with the click embedded in the video's audio track.
This click was sent to a channel in the band's Aviom mixers. The first few services went off without a hitch, but then we started getting complaints mid-performance that the musicians were hearing "some other band" and "someone talking" in their ear monitors.
At this point I should mention that we have another venue on the same campus, which had another band in there performing the same songs (but not at exactly the same time.) This was the band the musicians were claiming they were hearing, but I know this audio system inside and out, and while there are 32 channels of CobraNet between the two rooms/consoles, I knew what they were claiming was an impossible situation in regards to Aviom/CobraNet routing.
In between services, we tried to further troubleshoot, and sure enough could hear the FOH guy in the other room talking plain as day, as if he had a mic on… then it suddenly became clear what was happening: Did I forget to mention that in the other room there is an Axis webcam mounted at FOH, so that various people can look in on that venue from other parts of the building? And did I mention that the Axis Webcam has a tiny mic with audio enabled on it?
Yup, you guessed it…the video ops guy running the iMac in the main room just happened to fire up a Web browser and point it at the Axis webcam to see how the crowd looked over there, and the audio dutifully came out of the iMac into the click channel of all Aviom users!
Thankfully, we found and fixed the "issue," and no other services suffered with rogue audio in the band's ears. The moral of the story? Audio can sometimes take completely unexpected and surprising routes!
-Jim Michael, Windsor Crossing Community Church, Chesterfield, Mo.
