Is the USB B Streaming to mixer reliable enough for a dance gig?

[WaihekeSoundieParticipant]

Hi there,
I have a dance show gig coming up.. Lots of ballet and contemporary dancers doing rehearsed dances to recorded tracks.

For sound I normally would use my RME fireface as a DAC from my macbook and take analog outs from it into my QU16.
I do love the sound of the RME gear but it’s dropping out on OS X 🙁 I just can’t trust it for a dance gig.

But I don’t love the sound quality from the headphone jack from my macbook..
One possibility is to use the USB link to the mixer? I assume that, once connected, the mixer would present as an output device option in the OS X sound controller panel and I can select it and play from iTunes to it?

Is it reliable – USB from OS X (Catalina 10.15.6)?
Music stopping mid-dance while I fiddle around re-starting stuff is a nightmare scenario for kids and me..
Thank you

[MarkPAmanParticipant]

I’ve never had any problems with playback on USB, though my OS is not as up to date as yours.

However, if you can find one (no so easy around here, though not impossible) the Peavey USB P box has always been rock solid for me. I use it for any “unknown” laptop that may turn up and it just works straight away with every computer I’ve ever plugged it into – probably in the 100s over many years! A very useful bit of kit to keep in the toolbox and not expensive.

[volounteerParticipant]

@WaihekeSoundie

Read all the threads with complaints about usb here.
It might work for you and then it might not.

Why not go direct without the usb

We run our pc into our Qu, and we run the CD player into the Qu and both work fine.
Normal inputs no usb involved. No problems other than operator not cueing them up right:)

[WaihekeSoundieParticipant]

Thanks Volounteer,
Yeh– I can take an analog out from my laptop via the laptop headphone amp. It’s just that I found that the sound is just NOWHERE near as good as I get out of a decent DAC.. but the only DAC I have is an RME Fireface UC that is having dropouts over USB from my MacBook. An audio dropout is totally untenable for the kind of show I have coming up – so was thinking that maybe the QU could be my DAC..

Just a thought.. I’m working on trying to fix or workaround the Fireface issue as well… (it seems stable when input over SPDIF)

Thanks

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