Week 8: Cable for AV & Stage

Visual identification of cabling in an AV environment is at the heart of becoming an engineer. One must be able to distinguish the cable type, its use, the type of signal that it is carrying, and where and what it should be connected to. Failure to recognize visually what's happening with the signal path is a common error. One must learn the techniques of documenting signal path via documents and diagrams but a good engineer can also "see" the entire signal path of all of his signals in his or her head. Visualization of your signal path is crucial for safety reasons, planning for the unexpected, planning for the expected, planning for problems with fallback schemes and redundancy, and most importantly, troubleshooting problems. When you run into problems you have to be able to visualize where the problem could originate from!