There's a habit I keep running into and I just don't get it: the fight over analog splits. A separate stage box for every console, the inputs split so each engineer can ride his own analog gain — as if the soul of the show lives in who controls the preamp.
It doesn't. Not anymore. In the analog days, gain was tone — push a preamp differently and you changed its color. On a modern digital console, that's not what's happening. Between roughly +18 and +30 you're changing sensitivity, not character, and live dynamics swallow the rest. Sure, a Midas, a DiGiCo, an AVID each have their own flavor — but chasing that flavor through a split, on a digital desk, is solving an analog-era problem that's already gone. Here's what actually works: gain sharing. One stage box, feeding FOH, monitors and broadcast from the same preamps, each console riding its own level digitally, nobody stepping on anyone. And if someone truly wants a lower analog setting, gain compensation handles it — drop the analog gain and the console quietly adds digital gain to hold the level. Everybody gets independent control. Nobody needs a split. I saw this land recently. A visiting crew showed up set on running their own digital stage boxes, fought with them for hours, and ended up on a single shared box, braced for compromise. I gave them a five-minute brief, then made it even easier — recalled the last show's session, locked the gains in as digital at both FOH and monitors, and told them not to touch the analog again. Ten minutes later they weren't just fine. They were enjoying how simple it had become. And the one that really gets me — running a CAT cable all the way to a stage box at the back, then patching the wireless receivers sitting right next to it by analog, because "I trust XLR more." Think about it: the receiver is digital, you convert it to analog to leave the rack, convert it back to digital at the box, and it travels to the desk as digital anyway. Two conversions to nowhere — a little latency, a little signal lost — when one Dante cable would have kept it clean the whole way. The "warmth" people miss is usually just the gentle distortion old gear adds. Digital is fast and clean and carries exactly what went in. My team in Turkey has been gain sharing for fifteen years. The analog split isn't a standard anymore — it's a memory. Keep it simple. Share the box. Still splitting analog when you could share one box? I'd love to know why.