dLive dual Mixrack

[Paul LothParticipant]

A friend of mine wondered whether you could use 2 Mixracks with one Surface for redundancy. I saw while googling that you could use 2 Mixracks with ilive to increase channel account.

[BrianParticipant]

You cannot have multiple mixracks in the same way that you could with iLive. But that really only allowed you to increase the I/O count (up to 128 channels). The second mixrack was a “slave” and it didn’t actually give you a redundant mixrack to handle the processing should the primary one go down for some reason. In fact, it has some weird limitations like the fact that your FX had to be inserted on channels 1-64 and not 65-128 (because the 2nd mixrack didn’t have processing).

As far as redundancy with DLive goes, there are some possibilities……

First, you should look at the S Class DLive devices. They have a lot of redundancy built in (redundant power supplies and redundant digital connections for example).

Second, when it comes to redundant surfaces, that is allowed in the DLive environment. It could be a physical surface or a computer running the DLive Director software which is an online/offline editor for the DLive mixracks. Personally I think you should always try to have a dedicated computer running Director connected during any show as a redundant surface. This way if the primary surface fails, you still have a way to control the show while someone tries to get the surface back up and running.

Third, it is much harder to figure out a way to have redundant mixracks. You would have to use an analog split to two mixracks (both with enough I/O to support the show)? That would be the only logical option IMHO because using tielines, and digital connections between the two mixracks would fail should one of the mixracks fail. Even then, you would have to figure out how to keep the primary system and the backup system “in sync” with each other (as much as possible) and have someone how to change the outputs over to the backup system should the primary system fail. Honestly it seems like more work than it is worth (but I’m not working shows big enough where this might be considered).

[DaveParticipant]

Personally I think you should always try to have a dedicated computer running Director connected during any show as a redundant surface. This way if the primary surface fails, you still have a way to control the show while someone tries to get the surface back up and running.

Agreed, or at least an iPad for MixPad.

Anyway, WRT the OP’s original question, there’s not really an integrated way to do that now, but I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible from a technical PoV….

For the I/O, I’ve heard of (but not used) devices that let you select which of two (or more?) consoles are connected to the PA, monitors, and I think stage snakes. I believe they’re typically used for festivals, to speed up the changeover by already having the next band’s boards hooked up and ready to go. I don’t know anything about them, though, nor whether the “changeover” can be automated in some way. I get the impression that they’re really expensive, but as I said, I don’t know anything about them. If that doesn’t work for inputs (or is too expensive) all I can think of is an analog split or Dante, since it can route a single channel to multiple devices. If that doesn’t work for outputs (or is too expensive), I’ve used some amps which can be set to automatically failover to their analog inputs if their digital connection drops. If your outputs aren’t going to such a device, though, the only other thing I can think of that should work in general is running all the outputs to some sort of matrix mixer (preferably one that has mute groups) and just mute whichever MixRack you don’t want to listen to. It’s not automated, but I can’t think of anything better.

For keeping the two MixRacks in sync, in principle, A&H could probably let one MixRack to mirror another which is on the same network. I’d imagine that having the backup MixRack present itself as an instance of Director to the first MixRack would simplify the synchronization logic since that’s what already happens when you connect Director to a MixRack. AFAIK (which might not be saying much) finding time to code it up would be the limiting factor, I think, unless there’s just not room in the firmware. For a far more manual syncing solution, you could load the same show file on both MixRacks, have an A2 use Director to connect to the active MixRack while pulling the settings from hardware, disconnect from the active MixRack and connect to the backup MixRack while pushing settings to the hardware, and repeat. I’m pretty sure they’ll hate you for it, and you wouldn’t be able to pick up exactly where you left off, but it’d probably be better than nothing.

For getting the surface to switch over, we have two MixRacks and two surfaces here, all networked together… There’s an option in the surface settings for which MixRack it should connect to. I haven’t messed with it, but if that setting does what it appears it to do, you can already have a surface control a MixRack over the network instead of gigaAce. It’d probably be “better” if the surface was connected via another gigaAce card, but I don’t know how that’d work. Failing either of those, the manual solution is to run both sets of gigaAce cables to FoH and switch which pair is connected to the surface (I assume you’d have to power-cycle the surface, but I don’t actually know).

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