Could this Have Been A Brown-Out?

[Bill Bassett]

Yesterday my little 4 piece oldies rock band was playing at an afternoon house party. Beautiful day here in Arizona, sunshine, light breeze and the shade of several large trees to keep us cool. But, about half way through the 2nd set, the PA started to break up. We checked mics, wires, interconnections between things and so on. It seemed to go back to normal for a while but the distortion returned off and on the rest of the day.

My hunch was that because we had 2 guitar amps, a bass amp, a 400 watt power amp and another 300 watt monitor amp all plugged into one little ol' power strip, we may simply have been drawing too much juice. No circuit breakers were tripped, no fuses blew and no one smelled smoke so the only thing on which I base my diagnosis is the memory of garage bands past. The intermittent nature of the problem I blame on the air conditioning inside the house cycling on and off. Does this sound feasible to y'all?
(Yeah, I know we need to get a power conditioner and it will never happen again.)
Thanks,
Bill Bassett
Rimrock AZ

[Blake Hawkins]

Bill,
I've had that problem. Our solution was to run
an additional extention cord and power strip from
another wall socket in the house which is on
a separate breaker than the original.
Then we divided up the power feeds to our stage and PA
amps.
Blake