Hi,
I'm a newbie on this forum. I'm a professional musician, own an audio production company and have been doing studio engineering and live sound engineering for 20 years. Relatively recently I started getting into the business of doing installs for some local schools and houses of worship. Admittedly, there are still some things I need to be more familiar with and I'm not ashamed to ask for advice. I've come across a request which I imagine is probably commonplace, however I personally have never done a job installing it. So please if you have any advice, it would be greatly appreciated.
I will be putting together a quote for a school that needs to replace it's incredibly old and jury-rigged sound system in its main auditorium. The room however has multiple uses so the seats are not installed in the floor. They are constantly stacked and moved out of the way. Because of that, the main board will need to also be mobile with a snake going back to the front of the room. That in itself I have no problem with. The administrator that I met with however did mention that he wants to have one installed "plug-and-go box" on a wall that one or two mics can easily be plugged into by the students and immediately be working without them having to pull out the main board and know how to work the entire system. He does not want to have a separate speaker system for this, rather it should interface with the main system. I know that I would probably end up using a line mixer of some sort, but my question is how do I interface this line mixer with the amp(s) that will be feeding the mains? Ideally the main outs of the mixing board will be going into the amp and left that way. But if I send the output of the line mixer into one of the channels on the board then the problem arises when that board needs to be rolled out for productions. The line mixer will have to be pulled out and that is precisely what the school administrator doesn't want. He wants it to be a fixed input that never needs to be messed with.
What is the best way to accomplish this? Is there a unit that maybe can accept the outputs from two different mixers and send them to the same amp simultaneously? Any help or advice in this area would be greatly appreciated.