By dead in the water...you mean nothing...no lights illuminating at all on the back or front of the RM? And you say you 'had to wait' the first time....what exactly did you do. Just leave the RM unplugged for 15 minutes, or you plugged in, powered on, and waited 15 minutes before it came up?

Can you replicate the behavior at will?

Dead in the water meaning nothing - no lights, front or rear.

Just leaving it unplugged (and I mean everything disconnected) and a few attempts to power it back up (while there was dead silence and not too happy audience - we had a DJ going at the time playing thru my system).

After 10-15 minutes of waiting, and then start trying to figure out how to work around it, I plugged it back in and she powered up.

Saturday night was the last gig, so I haven't tried to replicate it, but I will because I have some SMAART to do on my monitors.

Brutal...I guess you did the obvious and made sure you didn't have a wonky power cord or outlet you were working with? Do you use a UPS to power the RM?

Furman Power Conditioner on top - YES
Driverack PA+ in the middle
RM16AI on bottom

SKB Shallow 8U Case

Tried different power cords BOTH times it happened LOL

If a power source and cord that will power something else won't power up the RM without a long wait, you have a faulty unit. There are no circumstances where this would be expected behaviour.

You're lucky it hasn't died altogether. Failures happen. Get it repaired before it seriously lets you down.

The furman does not provide protection from brownouts. It is only a glorified powerstrip...

I've always had my RM32ai on a UPS since it's basically a little computer. I have Furman conditioners in my rack as well, but there is far too much voodoo going on out there in the land of crummy venue and festival power world to depend on a power strip.

Same here, I have a 1000VA UPS powering my X32 or 16.4.2 and the PC controlling them. I've seen too many PCs end up with scrambled hard drives after power drops.

I also bring 150 feet of #10 extension cord. At our last gig, "Reach The Beach" at Pacific City OR, the DJ power was insufficient and my UPS kicked in and was reading 100V on its display. We grabbed another Honda generator and my heavy duty power cord and then read 120V at the UPS.

Same here, I have a 1000VA UPS powering my X32 or 16.4.2 and the PC controlling them. I've seen too many PCs end up with scrambled hard drives after power drops.

I also bring 150 feet of #10 extension cord. At our last gig, "Reach The Beach" at Pacific City OR, the DJ power was insufficient and my UPS kicked in and was reading 100V on its display. We grabbed another Honda generator and my heavy duty power cord and then read 120V at the UPS.

Yep, I'm going to dig out the one I have (used it for my desktop years ago) and replace the battery.

Best safe than sorry.

Well, I downloaded and installed the latest firmware update v8591. I started the install process and went to work. Got home.

Turned off the unit, removed the USB drive, slid the card back in and and flipped the power switch.

NOTHING! Dead in the water, no lights, nothing. I felt the heatsink fins on the rear and they seemed warm, but not overly warm in my opinion.

WTH??

SO, I pull the card back out and bleep!! One of the Firewire receptacles is floating around, like it unsoldered itself from the circuit board!!!

Its obvious that the soldering wasn't done properly and this wasn't forced off because all of the tiny conductors are in perfect condition!!!

And the blinkers on my car stopped working today!!! (not related I am sure LOL)

See the pic below:

Yikes. That jack 'floating around' in there possibly shorting across connectors...that might be a problem. So...does the RM power up fine without the option card inserted, but not when the option card is inserted?

Nope, dead in the water, with or without the card inserted, even after waiting for 30 minutes, and just in case I pointed a small fan at the cooling fins.

I bit the bullet and ordered another one from Sweetwater with overnight shipping (we're splitting the cost of shipping), and their sending me an RMA to ship this one back for repair. 3-5 weeks turnaround time. I have a gig on Saturday and Sunday, and the following weekend an outdoor festival, and my Yamaha MG116cx wouldn't be able to run it all properly.

The only positive note is that the RM's are now scalable, but I don't see any future gigs where I would use more than 16 channels LOL

Upside is you'll have a spare. Never hurts to have a spare.

Spare yes.

Quick Question???

Can I use one as a stage box and run a Cat5 from it to the other RM16 (FOH), and "mirror" them?

Yeah, I know. A VERY expensive "stage snake" (I already have 3 standard stage snakes - 25, 50, 75ft'ers)

In this setup, which RM box would I use for the MAIN OUTS?

You would cascade the two RM16ai's via AVB to form a 32 channel mixer. Mix outputs are mirrored on the two RM's. The channels on the RM you setup as master will show up first in UC Surface.

So, even cascaded, there would only be 8 AUX outs?

As far as I know : yes all aux and main are mirrored , no separate patching .You also need a avb switch , direct connection between two RM's causes crackling sound .