Equipment Failure, LIVE!

Anybody ever had an equipment failure during your live stream? We had one last night. One of our mixer channels had a meltdown. Ear piercing glitch followed by mellow static. Almost like the ocean sound in a sea shell......

What's sad is it happened on our backup mixer. The normal unit is in the shop for repair and it's less than a year old! The backup (which was the original mixer we started out with almost six years ago) already had four bad channels. They're droppin' like flies! Pretty much ALL of its line inputs are now toast.

Both the backup/old mixer and the new one that's being repaired are Behringer. I've defended this company from time to time but my confidence in them, as you can imagine, is pretty shaken now. They also gave me a loaner unit that sounds like $#%&. The sliders on all the line inputs affect the volume of the mic inputs! When you pot one of them up the mics get all distorted, almost like they're clipping even though they aren't. Now I'm no sound engineer, but sliders changing the volume of channels they're not even on? That defeats the whole purpose of a multi-channel mixer, does it not?

And what's more, the local branch is telling me it's going to be eight weeks for the parts to be shipped. Eight weeks! Is this stuff coming on a 19th century steam boat? Luckily, Music Group has a warranty repair center in Las Vegas (where I live) so I didn't have to ship anything. It's a 20-minute drive to drop off and pick up.

Needless to say, corporate is getting an E-Mail. Their response will dictate how nice I stay. I may just bite the bullet and buy a Mackie. I've used them in the past. Anyone had any experience with Allen & Heath?

Try hitting them up on Twitter, as well. While I like Behringer mixers, they are strictly low-cost, almost disposable units.

Yep, they got a message from me on both platforms.

I had this happen a bunch of times early when I started internet broadcasting. We have not lost a show in a long time. We started doing a back up recording about a year ago and that solved the issue.

While I have not used Behringer mixers before, I have talked to quite a few that have. Don't know if I would trust them from what people have been talking about them. ( In fact reading at the beginning of your post I already guessed you were probably talking about a behringer ) I tend to stay away from too cheap priced equipment and focus on mid priced or occasionally high priced stuff as the reliability is usually better. But there are always exceptions of course.

I'm currently using a Mackie and not had a problem since I bought it. But your milage will vary and there are many good reliable brands. I've heard Heath & Allen were suppose to be a good brand even better then Mackie.

But the last time I heard about Mackie it was bought out by the company "Loud". They also brought out the bass amp company AmPeg, moved everything overseas and had reliability issues. But that was long ago. Maybe its changed since then.

Luckily we didn't lose the show. In fact, the dying channel kind of added to the fun. It was the channel that handles our sound effects. It was very fitting because it went out just as we played a gunshot. Everything else was fine. We had a laugh, I potted that channel down and we finished the last 20-minutes of the show.

The only time we ever lost an entire episode was when I forgot to hit record. That's only happened once though in our nearly six years.

I just had my first failure. I was recording a test podcast and the power went out. 45 min into it. lost everything.