Simplified GigaACE Monitor Split Patching & Gain Sharing

[garrettvanderveenParticipant]

I was recently in a festival situation with a dLive S5000 at FOH and monitors, digitally split via GigaACE. Both were running existing show files that had all inputs coming to the Local sockets on the DM rack. We ended up deploying a bunch of DX168s this time around to eliminate the copper subsnakes that we had been using in the past, however this does present an interesting issue since we are now handling the patching in the digital realm.

Because this is a GigaACE split, patching needs to happen in two places. First is the input socket patched to the input channel on the monitor console and the second is the input socket patched to the I/O Slot X output socket to hit FOH. This opens up room for errors and consumes unnecessary time, which is an issue in a fast-paced festival situation. Direct Outs are an option, but not an ideal one, as the option exists to follow fader levels and mute.

The perfect solution to this lies within the virtual soundcheck tab of the I/O window. Here’s my suggestion: Duplicate the Virtual Soundcheck tab and functionality to allow us to utilize this for splits. Because this essentially works like tie lines that follow input patching, this would be an ideal solution to remove the additional step, while still maintaining the freedom to go around that and hard patch something if needed. Select the I/O port being used for the split, enable it, and it’s done. Nice, simple, and fast.

Additionally, this could also be a great place to integrate gain sharing/tracking between consoles on different DM racks. Gain levels from the “master console” could be sent alongside audio, following the existing patch to one or more “slave consoles”. Since slave consoles would inherently run with trim only, the only data that would need to be supplied would be either absolute gain level or relative gain level centered around 27dB and pad on/off information. If monitors ends +3dB from the 27dB default, FOH trims down -3dB to compensate, still requiring user intervention to change the actual input level at the FOH console, but leaving preamp control entirely in the hands of a single operator. On top of that, a momentary on-screen button at the master console could temporarily override this feature for setting levels across the board initially and slave consoles would have the option to “unsubscribe” from this and follow gain as things sit currently.

Just a thought!

[StarskyParticipant]

I think you are over complicating this. It really is a very very simple patch procedure. If you want to flip between different input patches then save a scene applying a filter to only recall the patching then if you want to you can assign the scenes to soft keys.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Netracer24Participant]

Although it is not recommended, we have now switched to using direct outs from FOH to get the signal to monitors and broadcast at one of our installations. It is a large setup with a dm64, 2 dm0’s, 4 dx168’s, and 4 dx32’s. Patching became a nightmare until we switched to using direct outs. Now patching happens at FOH and it’s done. We tell the FOH guys to not use trim because that now affects everyone. We also tell them to get gains set as much as possible during soundcheck and rehearsal and communicate with the other engineers when changing gain. If FOH needs gains to be changed, so does everyone else so really isn’t an issue.

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