Wanting to bypass podium to mix audio on DAW for events

[devinbost]

Our area has been wanting to put together face-to-face like events for our youth (with lapel mics, etc.), and I'm trying to find a way to bypass the chapel audio so I can mix it myself on a DAW. We've tried mixing the audio with a hardware mixer and then feeding it into a chapel XLR and mixing it again when it gets to the back room, but we're getting horrible feedback issues when people walk around with microphones. I want to use Ableton with the Waves X-FDBK feedback elimination plugin, but I don't want to need two mixers... It becomes totally unmanageable when troubleshooting live issues when there are multiple mixers, and other people don't want to support it. No studio would ever do that... They just have one big mixer.

Theoretically, if I could bypass the podium mic, I could use audio over ethernet to send the audio from the wireless mics to the back room, mix it on my DAW, and then run audio over ethernet again to get back to the chapel, convert it to XLR, and plug it into the podium to get sound through the chapel speakers.

But, is there a way to bypass the podium mic while keeping the speakers running?

[Wattsuk]

We do this by using the line input in the chapel instead of the XLR inputs that are mic level.

Some chapels have 3.5mm input, others have RCA inputs.
We've successfully done this in two buildings in our stake.

Hope that helps.

[devinbost]

Thanks for the suggestion.

What's the difference between the line input and XLR input in terms of how it's wired?

[Wattsuk]

I'm not sure of the schematics and as ours are older buildings they don't share the same components but both exhibit similar issues.

We've found in both cases that using the line level input either eliminates or at least reduces the DSP effects that the in house mixer is applying that are out of our control.

We have tried using passive and active adapters to bring the line level to the correct signal to use the XLR sockets but even with those, the in house mixer somehow messes up the feed.

Possibly the effect of multiple mixers conflicting and counteracting each other?