DCA "Soft Mute" and ability to unmute channels on muted DCA

[MattParticipant]

1) When I mute a DCA it hard-mutes the channels, meaning it also disappears in the band’s ears. On most desks (including a basic desk like the X32) DCAs “soft-mute” channels, meaning they only mute what’s going out to the house. The channel still goes to aux sends (for things like ears) and also didn’t mute when going to the P16m’s (the Behringer equivalent of the ME-500). Can this be brought to the Avantis line as well?

2) On the Avid line of desks (think like a D-Show or an SC-48) when I muted a DCA, I could still unmute an individual channel within that DCA and it would bypass the DCA mute. The DCA fader level still impacted the channel level, but I was able to send audio through that channel out to the house. Would this type of feature be able to be brought over to the Avantis? This feature was incredibly useful, and I (along with most other audio techs who were working on the D-Show line who I worked with) made use of this feature quite often.

Thanks!

[KeuleParticipant]

To the first part:

If you use the fader of your dca instead of the mute button, you won’t effect your aux mixes.

Mute is not an On Off button, its a safetyguard and triggers at the start of the Inputline, before all sends and other processing and routing. If you going to unplug or change something, mute will help to secure not mess is going anyway thru your mixer. So this is a completly different function, than you are looking for.

Second part: I cant speak for other vendors and producers, but my experience with sticking to standart behaviers of functions, like A&H does normaly is a pro, not a con, cause you will not fall to problems caused by overcustimization, like a lot of technicians do on – for example digico – other consoles. Its a tool, and if it behaves completely different as expected, this might give you a lot of troubles.

Work with mutegroups, and seperate mutegroups for your voice or break chan. This will do nice, and every other technition will be able to work with it.

Kind regards

[MattParticipant]

If you use the fader of your dca instead of the mute button, you won’t effect your aux mixes.

Sure – I get that… And that’s what I’ve been doing. But by pulling the fader of the DCA to 0, you also are now effectively adjusting the house level just to keep audio going to the aux mixes. That’s not very ideal, and on most consoles I’ve used in the past DCA muting doesn’t impact the aux mixes unless I’m sending to the aux mix post-fader (because a DCA Mute is essentially just pulling the channel fader to 0).

Work with mutegroups, and seperate mutegroups for your voice or break chan. This will do nice, and every other technition will be able to work with it.

Again, I understand where you are coming from. In my case, the way I see it is it adds one more moving part into the workflow. And mutegroups will hard-mute channels, which still doesn’t accomplish my goal of killing the send to the house and not to my aux mixes.

Thanks though!

[BrianParticipant]

I think it’s correct that the DCA mute is designed to mute the channel. After all, the DCA is effecting things at the channel level – so it shouldn’t be surprising that muting the DCA would mute the channel. Perhaps the real question/issue is why A&H has decided that muting a channel occurs so early in the signal chain. It effects even “direct outs” which may not be appropriate in a lot of situations. It would be very helpful if A&H gave users some more choices as to where the “mute” occurs in the signal chain.

I also agree that being able to “unmute” a channel that is muted by a DCA would be very helpful.

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