Tuesday VO Tech Tip: No Power and a New Failure Mode

The other day our local power went out for no clear reason. The first thing I noticed was an overhead light fixture that turned off. Then both of my battery backup systems started beeping a waltz time warning every minute or so, which meant there was no power from the outlets. The internet was unaffected and the studio computer kept humming away as the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems engaged to keep things running.

The danged beeping continued unabated. It turned out the one thing I didn’t know was how to actually silence the incessant and annoying noise – one of those little details that you realize only when other things are tugging at your attention.

After failing to find the information online, I unearthed the printed manual which had shipped with the battery backup units, and my wife skimmed through the rather stilted verbiage to find the non-obvious method of silencing persistent beeps. Meanwhile, I had to start a remote tech session with a client who graciously ignored the beeping in the background for the first 10 minutes of our time together.

This event carried with it a twofold reminder:

• First, stuff fails. Often with no warning or logic.
• Second, we improve iteratively. In other words, we have to fail a bit in order to learn and move forward.

That second reminder was about to come into play.

There have been many studies about how catastrophic failures occur. (I’d recommend Tim Harford’s excellent podcast “Cautionary Tales” if that’s of interest to you). While some failures certainly have just a single critical component, more commonly catastrophic results stem from a series of seemingly simple issues. As these tiny problems stack up, they combine to obscure a clear method of recovery, or we react to fix the first but neglect to pay attention to the next one which is developing out of our range of perception.

In this case, I had the idea in my brain that the studio’s battery backup would run for an hour and 20 minutes. Since the client session was only an hour, it felt like a safe margin.

I had neglected to account for two things. First, the actual power outage had occurred about 15 minutes before the session start, and I lost track of time while I hopped on the internet and then resorted to digging out the manual from my filing cabinet. Second, in the year and a half since I first set up the UPS system, I had a couple other small items which had been added to the power strips. That meant that there was a bit more draw on the battery.

That became obvious when I looked at the readout of the studio UPS and saw an estimated 43 minutes of available power when I had about 53 minutes of session left. Luckily, as we exhausted the last of the battery juice I was able to quickly lateral to the laptop to wrap things up and my client was very understanding of the short delay.

In this case, enough of a failure to hopefully cause a bit of improvement. It may be a more stripped down set of items attached to the UPS, or possibly upgrading to one with a bit more capacity. Whatever the solution, the failure will lead to the improvement. 

Have you tested your studio’s audio quality to make sure it meets professional standards? For a free review of your vocal recordings, please use the upload tool on my Audio Review page.

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