by Kevin Burke. @ke7inburke.
NEW YORK, NY - During a Thursday night performance of an Off-Off-Off-Broadway production of something called The Bucket, local audio engineer Tom Bresnahan struggled to maintain a basic understanding of his job requirements, the audio equipment, and the concept of sound in general, leaving many in attendance to believe he wouldn’t even know an S/PDIF RCA cable from a common three-pin XLR.
“So, I messed up! It happens! I can still keep my membership in the ‘Brotherhood for an Auditory Future,’ right?!” screamed Bresnahan mere moments before being fired and comically thrown out the front door like a cartoon character. “It’s not my fault! How was I supposed to know to turn the microphones on for everyone?”
Susan Montello, a Broadway performer who has a caricature on the wall at Sardi’s that kind of looks like her if you squint, was in attendance.
“He kept sporadically shouting ‘we can’t hear you!’ to the performers during the show. I was like ‘yeah, I agree, but isn’t that your job?’”
Montello then described the situation which unfolded in the audience.
“We were frustrated, and he seemed confused about the cables, so everyone started yelling ‘the S/PDIF RCA cable is a type of digital audio interface used in consumer audio equipment to output audio over relatively short distances. The common XLR has three pins and is used to interconnect powered speakers with line-level signals for PA system applications, you fuck!’ Everyone yelled that together and it was beautiful.”
The Bucket’s director, Carla Torrey, who's last production was the controversial Cool Kids Don’t Wear Seatbelts, had a few words to say about Bresnahan’s termination.
“I didn’t want to fire him. After all, he is my son-in-law,” said Torrey, who kept asking me if I knew anything about running audio. “I tried to understand why the mics never turned on, but the dimwitted easy-listener couldn’t even explain why his interface setup was set to jazzy-mode. Like what kind of tone deaf walrus doesn’t even have his low and high-end knobs turned to the slipperiest frequency? At some point, I just had to accept the fact that this familial nincompoop was way in over his whammy cage on this particular compression pack.”
When pressed to identify which side of a microphone is the talking end, Mr. Bresnahan replied “I’ll be happy to answer all of your questions once my attorney is present" directly into the wire side.
The common XLR has three pins and is used to interconnect powered speakers with line-level signals for PA system applications snow rider