FX Issues in Monitor

[hunterleathParticipant]

Hello,

We have an Allen & Heath SQ6 and use 10 monitor mixes for our band. Our acoustic player has complained for months that he does not have enough FX on the vocals in his IEMs (even though on his SQ4You App and the board, his FX are maxed out). Here’s his monitor signal chain: Mon 6 from the board > Analog snake > Stage input (from snake) > His wired pack. Obviously, we assumed it was a bad cable somewhere. So I bypassed anything analog and came out of our GX4816 directly to his pack and made sure the routing was changed on the board. still have the same issue. We’ve changed wireless packs, cables, IEM headphones, even maxed out the overall volume of his pack to check and still have minimal FX (where they should clearly be SWIMMING). We’ve compared FXSends and Returns on each monitor channel, and they all appear to be routed the exact same way. Any clue as to what the issue could be? Thanks

[BrianParticipant]

There are two elements of a FX being used as a channel (instead of an “insert”). Specifically, overall FX levels are directly impacted by both the FX “send” levels & the FX “return” levels. It is quite possible that the vocal channels being sent to the FX are being sent at lower levels than “unity.” This means that even if the FX return channels are set at unity (or higher – you said they had it maxed out), it could be quite low due to the low “send” levels.

I suspect if you change your “send” levels to be higher, it will fix the musician’s issue. Of course this may require that everyone else turn down the FX return level too.

[SQuserParticipant]

Same question as a few days ago:
Are you sure that your FX Returns in the Mix Sends are also switched On?
(See picture and also page 42 of the manual.)

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[hunterleathParticipant]

I thought it could be a send issue as well, but after looking and checking that, they’re all the same across each channel. All FX Returns and sends are switched to “On”. Looking at his channel versus our drummer or mine (where everything seems to be working as it should), it all looks the exact same.

[SQuserParticipant]

I think you shouldn’t start troubleshooting at the end of the chain, but at the beginning.
The acoustic player really only receives one finished single-channel monitor mix via an analogue output (e.g. Mix 6)?
Then his mix would have to sound so bad at this output, regardless of whether it comes directly from the SQ or the stage box.
Is that so?
If this is the case, it must be due to the mix in the SQ and you can save yourself having to change the components that come after (wired and wireless pack(?), cables and headphones).
Or is his monitor mix on Mix 6 still ok??

[hunterleathParticipant]

I thought that could be the case, so I copied our Drummer’s mix settings and saved them over to the Acoustic monitor out (completely overwriting the settings he had… at least that’s what I understood to happen), and we still have the same issue. The only workaround I’ve thought of so far is to swap his mix with one of the empty ones (Mon out 11), and leaving his Mon out 6 as an empty output.

I’m more of a musician than a sound engineer… so some of these routing issues are a little foreign to me. But, based on what I’ve read in the manual and through these forums, I think I have everything routed as it should be. We’ve had a few random bugs in our system, so I may have to chalk this one up to something like that…

[KeithJ A&HModerator]

@hunterleath

We’d be happy to take a look at your show if you send it through to us via support.allen-heath.com.
You can do this by taking a copy to a USB drive and emailing from a computer, pulling to MixPad on a computer and sharing from a local drive, or by using the share option to email directly to support@allen-heath.com if using an iPad.

Thanks,
Keith.

[hunterleathParticipant]

Thanks, I’ll submit it via the support page.

[Author]

Posts