While working a recent event I noted that the room’s DSP was showing a strange error message. I don’t always poke at the house DSP, but when I do…. I notice things that are out of place. The QSC Core510i said effectively “I’m broken, please re-upload my firmware.” Backing away slowly, I left it exactly where it was. At the time I noted the error, audio was still passing and we needed that to continue in order to finish our event.
I did all the usual prep-work, booking the room for an entire day, contacting QSC support first to open a ticket and ensure I was following all of the correct steps. I knew that I was just as likely to finish off the DSP as repair it. Nobody wants to read the play-by-play so here’s the short version: Firmware goes in, blank screen and then BIOS screen comes back out. No worky worky.
It was at this point I rolled in the spare unit we keep onsite, updated it, swapped the I/O cards with the help of some co-workers, and sent the old unit off for RMA.
If I hadn’t noticed the failure, and handled it in this way, and had an on-site spare; the next power cycle or reboot would’ve left the company with no audio in their main auditorium. It was a good day