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Touring audiovisual gear lives in precisely the conditions the electrical rules are aimed at. Road cases get dragged across wet car parks, cable is coiled and uncoiled hundreds of times, amplifiers and dimmers run hot, and every item spends part of its life vibrating in the back of a truck. Moisture, heat, vibration, mechanical damage, corrosive chemicals and dust are the exact hazards clause 150 of the New South Wales work health and safety regulation names when it fixes the testing duty to the environment the gear is used in.

The little tag on the back of a console or a distro is that duty made visible. The regulation says in terms that the testing record may take the form of a tag fixed to the item, which is why a venue asking to see current tags is asking for compliance evidence rather than being difficult. Any supplier who bristles at the question is the wrong one to be running power across your floor.

Clause 151 finishes the job by prohibiting the use of gear that should have been tested and has not been. Brand new stock straight from the manufacturer sits outside the testing duty until it has been in service, but someone still has to check it for visible damage before it goes live, and a hire company should be able to say which of its stock falls into that category.

Anything suspended above people is a rigging job, whatever the industry calls it. Under clause 81 of the work health and safety regulation, a person must not carry out a class of high risk work without holding a licence for that class, and Schedule 3 defines the classes by task rather than by job title.

Dogging is the one that catches AV crews out. It covers applying slinging techniques, including selecting and inspecting lifting gear, to sling a load safely, and directing a plant operator moving a load that is out of the operator's view. Flying a line array or a lighting bar with a chain hoist while someone on the floor calls the lift is precisely that work. Basic rigging covers dogging plus a defined list including hoists, structural steel erection and mast climbing work platforms, and the intermediate and advanced classes add more complex equipment.

The load path is the other half. Venue rigging points, roof beams and ground support towers all have limits, and a rig designed without the venue's structural data is a rig that may not go up. Ask the AV company for the rigging plot with point loads marked, and ask the venue to confirm it against its own documentation. Where an elevating work platform is used to reach the points, a licence is required for boom-type machines with a boom length of eleven metres or more.

The work health and safety regulation sets a specific exposure standard for noise. It is an eight-hour equivalent continuous A-weighted sound pressure level of eighty-five decibels, written as eighty-five dB(A), or a C-weighted peak sound pressure level of one hundred and forty decibels, written as one hundred and forty dB(C). Both figures are determined in accordance with the Australian and New Zealand standard for measuring occupational noise immission and exposure.

Clause 57 requires a business to manage risks to health and safety relating to hearing loss associated with noise, and to ensure the noise a worker is exposed to does not exceed the exposure standard. Clause 58 deals with audiometric testing for workers frequently required to use personal hearing protection.

For AV work that matters in two places. The crew spend the whole day in the room, not just the ninety minutes the audience does, so their exposure is the sum of set-up, soundcheck, rehearsal and show. And a venue with a hard floor and glazing will run far louder at the same console setting than a carpeted room. Ask how the supplier manages crew exposure and whether they take a measurement rather than a guess.

Touring equipment lives hard, and the difference between suppliers shows in the stockroom rather than on the quote. Ask how cables and distribution are tested and tagged on return from a job rather than only on a calendar cycle, because the damage happens in transit and at bump-out.

Ask about lifting gear too. Slings, shackles and chain hoists have inspection regimes, and the dogging licence itself is defined partly by the selection and inspection of lifting gear. A supplier should be able to show inspection records for the gear that will hold things above your audience.

Lamps, batteries, projector filters and console firmware are the quieter side of the same discipline. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is why one company's gear works every time and another's needs a spare on the truck.