Hi Josh,
The symptoms described would point me towards a suspect snake card, cable or connectors. It sounds like only one direction is working (hence audio from Stage Rack to FOH Rack, but no return path for control). The loading of show files may or may not be a red herring, tough to say.
Couple of things to try:
- check all cables and connectors (including connectors on racks)
- reverse the cables and see if the problem also reverses
- open FOH rack and reseat all cable connections, including those to the DSP card(s)
- if it's a single stage rack system try connecting the FOH Rack snake card to DSP 1 instead of DSP 2, and enabling Stage 2 (and treat the single rack as Stage 2). This might rule out a DSP issue (which seems highly unlikely).
Calgary, eh? I grew up in Edmonton. Small world.
Sheldon