DCA metering

[woutersnoeiParticipant]

Hi, I was a bit disappointed to find out that the DCA faders don’t have metering on my new SQ-5. I’m used to metered DCA’s on Yamaha consoles, and it is very handy in live situations. Could this be implemented in a next version?

cheers & thanks,
Wouter

[KeithJ A&HModerator]

Hi Wouter,

You’re not the first to mention this as a feature suggestion, and I’m sure you won’t be the last!
https://community.allen-heath.com/forums/topic/metering-on-dca-channels

Could you expand on how this is useful to you?
As a DCA does not carry any audio, a meter of all members (say, averaged) would require a mix bus to be used and you could be using a DCA to adjust both input and output channels at the same time – what would you expect it to show?

Thanks,
Keith.

[woutersnoeiParticipant]

Hi Keith,

what I would expect to show is the same meters that happen when I hit PAFL on the DCA channel. Just to get an impression of what is going on (or not going on) on those channels. This makes DCA’s useful as a kind of limited-feature group, that can go across outputs and other group structures. In larger mixes I tend to group things in DCA’s (for those things that don’t require group processing) to keep it manageable with limited physical faders. Also I usually use a DCA on certain outputs as ‘master’ fader, as I work a lot with multichannel setups. There again some form of global metering is handy, although in practice I usually use the LR main for that (and the aux/group/matrices for actual outputs), creating a stereo mix for recording on the fly. Mixing inputs and outputs in a single DCA I rarely do (wouldn’t know any reason for that..), although for metering I suppose then those could just be summed. Peak warnings/lights could perhaps be disabled in such cases, as it could happen that nothing is actually peaking..

[KeithJ A&HModerator]

Hi Wouter,

Thanks for the extra info, DCA metering is on the feature request list, and so it’s really useful to understand more about what different engineers would expect from it. We wouldn’t want to add something that’s unclear, or that would misinform operators.
What you describe here would require extra busses though. Aside from the (visible in GUI) processing that happens on a mix bus, they are carrying out all the mixing/summing of channels and need to exist in the architecture of the core to be available for use.
When PAFL’ing a DCA, you are using the PAFL bus to carry out the mixing of it’s members, and incidentally the PAFL bus has none of the mix processing you get on groups/auxes/LR/matrices either…

Definitely a good idea to disable the Pk LED’s btw, else they’d be going all the time!

Cheers,
Keith.

[woutersnoeiParticipant]

Hi Keith,

good to know, thanks for the info. Btw: is there some place where I can see the feature request list, or should I just search the forum? (to prevent future double posting)

cheers,
Wouter

[KeithJ A&HModerator]

Hi Wouter,

It’s an internal list that includes suggestions from this forum but also from direct discussions with users, dealers and distributors.
It will not be made public, so using the search function here is the best way to find things that have already been suggested.
Of course there will always be some double posting that occurs, but we really appreciate you trying to avoid it!!

Cheers,
Keith.

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