Loose Jacks

[TechMonkey]

Hello All - New to the forum (and sound ) We are having issues with loose 1/4" jacks. We have Mackie VLZ- 32 board and are using the HearBack in ear monitor system. The problem is in the jack from the Hearback to the board. The jack(s) is plugged in to the 1st detent per the Mackie board manual and is constantly loose causing havoc in the ears of those on stage. If you plug it in fully it tightens as you would expect but you lose that channel in the mains. I can't come up with any real ideas to fix this so I'm hopeful someone else has already solved the problem!

[cmchamp]

I have had Rapco/Horizon make a custom snake for this application called a passthrough insert snake which allows fully inserted passing the signal through the board as well as out to the HearBack, Aviom or other personal monitor distribution system.

Welcome Aboard!

C.

[jpallman]

I understand your struggle, we have the same sound board with a hearback and had the same issue. The problem is your sound board does not have direct outs, and that is what the hearback really needs. I found 2 options to solve it:

As Cory said, there are insert to direct out converter cables available. You could get a custom snake made, buy them individually (about $6 per channel), or build them yourself. Just google insert direct out cable and you will get all sorts of info.

We actually ended up using a different solution because we had trouble only having 7 inputs available sometimes and we actually needed our inserts for some channels. We bought a shure auxpander, it gives us a matrix mixer with a direct out for each channel while still having a insert available for each channel. This allows us to group several signals into 1 hearback channel when we have a lot of instruments and still allows us to use channel effects like reverb or external EQ & most importantly compressors to handle the bass players that like to "slap" the strings sometimes

[TechMonkey]

Hi Guys - Sounds like a couple of doable fixes -Thanks for the info !