Last week working on site in London! I am quite relieved that I don’t have to travel two hours to work anymore but at the same time it is kind of a shame to leave the team who I have been working for in the past one month. I will definitely miss working on site but not the travelling part for sure! Since it is closing to the festive Christmas period, everyone wanted to get things done properly before they go away, so I would say my last week in Deloitte was tight and sweet. Let’s take a look at it then!

Biggest thing that was on the first day of the week was a pretty large event that involved with hire team that is based in Sunbury head office for renting out the kits, audio mixing and of course several content outputs. Since this event includes installing and presenating, both event team and engineering team take part of it. From the equipment handover with the hire team, de-loading and get all the equipment into the event space to setup every piece of kit for the event. While doing all these installing for either audio and video kits, it does make me reminds of the streaming event I have done when I was in uni. Thanks to the experience I have had in setup all different sorts of equipment before, it was easy for me to pick up quickly with slowing the team down. What I don’t think I have ever came across was to install a rear projector which is massive, and the space wasn’t that big so it literally took our engineers most of the time to line up the projection on the projector screen. Apart from that, all the other display and audio mixing desk setups are all quick and easy. Including setup amplifiers, receivers and mixing desk, then sync up the wireless microphones to be match to the certain frequency for the receivers to receive the input signals. However, there was a network issue that has been going on since Monday morning, which all the Wi-Fi were down in the building apart from connecting to LAN cables. The main device that is used for presenting the content was a MacBook and we need Wi-Fi to access the contents from the client. In the end, we managed to get another laptop to output the content which sorts out everything in the end.

Another main issue that is happening on site was the audio in the gym. One of the amplifiers was down in the classroom which the speaker that is connected to it wasn’t playing anything. Hence all the audio are linked onto the Q-SYS network, which we can monitor from the Q-SYS software. What we can see from the software was the main core and the other connections for the amplifiers are functionally working. First thing we did was rebooting the faulty amplifier itself to see if it will be back online, but nothing really worked. Suggested by the off-site support engineer, we rebooted the main core in that room and everything went back online properly. Another issue needs to be looked into is that client always complain about the volume being too low in the spinning classroom. When the system was being commissioned in the beginning, the tested output volume was in a decent loudness along with ducking routing to make the music slightly quieter when someone is talking into the mic. After we actually went into the spinning classroom and test the audio by directly playing the audio from our phone, it did appear to be a bit quieter than playing it out from the laptop, which is how the audio has been tested before. To boost up the volume a little more, what we did is simply adjust the amplifier on the same Q-SYS software by raising it up for a few dBs to maximise the volume.

Lucky me, since it is close to Christmas season, there was a Christmas party for each department which they chose a decent proper venue along with some good booze, food and band! It was a fantastic party also to end my time on site, I will just stop here and not to mention how much I have had that night…  Anyways, having an entire month to work in central London is definitely unforgettable and remarkable. This is also the end of my second phase placement scheme, time files that the year is about to end and I have become a professional worker(sort of?) for four months. From next week, I will go back to the head office and finishing off the project that I have left before coming on site in project engineering. After the Christmas and New Year holidays, I will officially chose one department to stay for the rest of my placement time! I will slowly reveal my choices and share some of my Christmas holiday in my next few posts. Please stay tuned!!

Mandy xx