GLD-80 and AR2412

[iwilder]

I have a GLD-80 and all of the inputs and outputs are connected to an AR2412 I/O box. I am continually losing output on speakers going through the AR2412. We thought it was a bad cat5 cable between the GLD and AR2412 and swapped the cable. This seemed to have fixed the problem but it has started happening again. Has anyone had this problem? While recording on the board USB from an mic output sent to a pc te recording never loses any sound.

[Chris93]

Are you sure it it’s anything to do with the AR2412 and not the power source for the speakers, for example, or built in thermal protection etc.? I’d expect that if the I/O rack or it’s comms were bad you’d be losing the inputs from stage too.

Are you losing signal on all devices which are getting their signal from the AR2412 at once or only some of them? Does the Home screen on the GLD show any QoS errors under “System status”?

Chris

[iwilder]

Thanks for the reply. We use this board at my church, and I am a bit of a novice at sound systems, but I think I’m picking it up slowly. It’s very strange, because sometimes all of the mic inputs don’t show any signal and sometimes they do, but either way the speakers have no output. Several months ago the drop would last anywhere from 30s to 2-3m. We have a sound company troubleshooting this as well, and they’ve chased down several possibilities, and like I said initially we thought we narrowed it down to the Cat5 cable connecting the AR2412 and GLD-80. Our sound company was going to send the GLD into Allen and Heath to have them go over the board, and swapped out a similar board that also connected to the AR2412. When they tested the other board, it did the same thing. So they swapped the Cat5 cable, and it stopped and never happened again while they tested it. They setup the GLD-80 again, and after they did this we still had some very small gaps where the mic would drop for 1 sec or 2, but we thought it might be wireless mic signal loss. Then one night the sound dropped out completely again. I reached over and jiggled the Cat5 cable on the AR2412 and the sound came back immediately. So then I swapped the custom made Cat5 cable for a pre-manufactured cable. This seemed to fix the problem for good, but within last 2-3 weeks the problem has returned with a vengence. Now the sound can drop out for 3-4m.

Our sound company also thought at one time it might be the AMM on the board. We have a couple of mics that we leave on during our service. Our pastor wears wireless mic but sometimes stands behind the podium. The board was setup to use the auot mic-mix feature, and we initially thought maybe the AMM was getting confused and not swapping mics correctly. I can watch the AMM an the mics seem to show signal the whole time. We’ve spent a lot of money and time troubleshooting this and it’s getting pretty frustrating.

[GCumbee]

This is a long shot. Have you checked your electrical voltage? I have ran into one situation on location last summer where a problem in the AC caused either the console or AR box to not work. This was with a QU-16 and AR2412. We had the power company put in a temporary service on a riverfront stage due to high water keeping us from using the regular box attached to the stage. There was something weird either with the neutral or something that created a problem on one of the distro power boxes. We fought it for awhile and finally moved everything to another box and it worked. We never verified what it was for sure. I know a guy helping did some checking with a volt meter. I have seen a lot of gear not function with either too low or too high voltage. You might at least look at that.

[iwilder]

Thanks I’ll check on that. At this point we’re going to start from ground zero and check everything!

[GCumbee]

Good. I have worked with GLDs and QU’s all over with all types of stage boxes. Multiple installs. I have never had a problem like this except that one time and it was definitely a voltage issue.

[Chris93]

It would be worth checking the voltage while the system is being used in the same manner as when you have the dropouts, something else may be pulling the voltage down during services but not show up when it’s tested on an off-day. It might help to know what’s on the same circuit and what isn’t, but turn on all your projectors, lights etc. and turn on the noise generator through the PA.

Chris

[iwilder]

I was looking around on the forums and remembered I never reported back what the problem turned out to be. It was a bad cable coming from an amp to the GLD-80 board. That amp runs the main speakers.

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