This AV company calls me up for a hotel testimonial dinner… just baby-sit a small system with a couple of mics for speakers. I get there and it's an improv company with eight lavs and a couple of wireless 58s with a Mackie 16ch and no EQ whatsoever. There are two powered Mackies jammed up against the plaster walls, a tile floor and lots of glass in the walls and ceiling. I'm thinking of taking a hike, but I'm supposed to be good enough to make it work.
I don't bring any gear with me, as I'm forbidden by the company to bring in my own gear unless the client pays for it and, of course, they won't. All I've got is my headphones, board tape, Sharpie and a small multi-tool on my belt. Oh, and I just happen to have a TRS-XLRM pigtail in my car. It had gotten left out in packing up another job and just tossed in.
I quickly reconfigure the "system" by chaining the speakers together, panning everything hard right, EQ'ing what I could with the channel strips and cut the now extra XLR cable with the multi-tool. Rewire the cable swapping pins 2 and 3 to reverse the phase, route the feeds from all the lavs back into an extra channel via a post fader aux and proceed to dial it into the mix as needed to phase-cancel the feedback from eight open lavs running around like crazy — often two or three within a foot of each other.
It's times like this that I'm proud to be an engineer. Show went well, client was happy, but I sweat a bucket and the headache lasted all night.
Hugh Manatee
(Name has been changed to protect the guilty… —ed.)
