Your Console Is 437 Pounds Before You Plug It In

I've pushed a lot of consoles up a lot of ramps, and the one thing nobody at FOH thinks about during the show is what that desk is on the truck. It's a row. It has a footprint, a height and a weight, and it's taking floor away from something else. The same goes for the PA. So I wanted to do the math on a pretty normal FOH and PA package and see how much of a 53-foot trailer it actually eats before you load a single backline case.

The console is 437 pounds in the box

Take a DiGiCo Quantum 338, since it shows up on a lot of riders. DiGiCo lists the bare console at 70 kg, or about 154 lb. In its flight case, the same page says it's 198 kg, or 437 lb, and the case is 1717 x 642 x 1144 mm. That's about 67.6 x 25.3 x 45 inches. So the case and the foam are close to twice the weight of the thing you actually mix on, which is the whole point of our post on what a road case weighs empty vs tour-ready. The number that matters on a truck is the packed one.

We've been pulling manufacturer data into the Truck Packer manufacturer library, and the DiGiCo rows we're adding carry that packed number. The Quantum 338 flight case comes in at 67.6 x 25.28 x 45.04 inches and 436.51 lb, which lines up with DiGiCo's spec page. The bare console gets left out on purpose, since nobody loads a desk without its case.

The PA comes four boxes to a cart

For the PA I used JBL's VTX A12, a pretty common touring box. Each one is 60.8 kg (134 lb) and 13 x 44 x 19.5 inches. They travel on the VTX A12 VT vertical transporter, which holds four boxes. The VT spec sheet puts the cart at 45 inches wide and 24 inches deep, and a complete cart with the hard top and four A12s at 285.7 kg, or 629.8 lb. The math checks out: four boxes at 134 lb plus 93.5 lb of cart and top.

That same drawing shows a loaded cart at somewhere around 60 to 66 inches tall. A 53-foot trailer gives you roughly 52 feet 6 inches of length, 99 to 100 inches of width and 108 to 110 inches of height. So you're not stacking carts on carts. The hard top is there so you can put other gear on top, which is worth planning for, because that space above the PA is otherwise just air.

The math, with my assumptions

Here's the package. I'm calling out what's mine and what's the manufacturer's, because the racks are where everyone's rig is different.

• Console: Quantum 338 in its case, 67.6 x 25.3 inches, 437 lb (DiGiCo spec).
• FOH rack: my assumption, a shock rack around 24 x 30 inches and 300 lb loaded.
• Stage rack / stagebox: my assumption, around 24 x 30 inches and 250 lb in its case.
• PA: 12 A12s a side, 24 boxes, so six VT carts at 45 x 24 inches and 629.8 lb each (JBL spec).

For FOH, the console case goes in across the trailer. At 67.6 inches wide, that leaves about 31 inches next to it, and a 24-inch rack fits there. The row is as deep as the deeper case, so about 30 inches, or 2.5 feet of floor. If the stage rack rides on top of the FOH rack, that's it. If it needs its own spot (and on a lot of tours it does, since it comes off first), call it 5 feet. That's about 987 lb for the FOH package.

The PA goes two carts across (90 inches in a 99 to 100 inch box) and three rows deep. At 24 inches a row, that's 72 inches, or 6 feet of floor. Six carts at 629.8 lb is about 3,779 lb.

Put together, FOH and the tops take somewhere between 8.5 and 11 feet of a 52.5 foot floor, which is 16 to 21 percent of the trailer. That's around 4,766 lb, and I haven't counted subs, amp racks, rigging frames, motors or a single cable trunk yet. Your rack weights will probably be different from mine, so plug in your own. The point is that you should know those numbers before the truck is booked, not while you're standing at the lift gate.

I built the tight version in Truck Packer, with the stage rack riding on top of the FOH rack, and here's the pack. The six carts go in at the nose, two across and three deep, and the FOH row sits right behind them. That's 8.5 feet of floor and 4,766 lb.

The crew view: six VT carts, the Quantum 338 case and two racks, 4,766 lb in the first 8.5 feet.

Top and side view. The carts stand about 63 inches, so there's still room over the PA for anything light.

FOH and PA are rows, not line items

When I advance a show, the console and the PA are usually one line each on a gear list. On the truck, they're rows with real depth, and they decide what can go on top of them and what has to go somewhere else. That's why we built Truck Packer around the actual case dims and packed weights. You drop the console case and six VT carts into a 53-footer and you see right away that you've used a fifth of the floor, and how much weight is sitting in that part of the trailer.

Want to see where your FOH and PA land on the deck? Log in to Truck Packer and build the rows.