Soft keys for talkback to specific destinations

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  • #90623
    Profile photo of Phil DriscollPhil Driscoll
    Participant

    Hi

    I normally use my SQ5 for multi-track recording of music and speech for radio programmes. However, in the current COVID emergency, it has taken over as the nerve centre of our remote studio operations. It currently has a number of local audio sources, but also several remote sources, for presenters, interviewees, contributors and phone in guests.
    Each of these remote sources has their own clean feed (or mix minus) cue mixes from the desk, so that they can hear the programme but minus their own contribution to it, so that they don’t hear delayed echoes of themselves.
    The ‘Talk’ button on the desk is configured to talk to all of these remote sources (mix one to four), and that’s great, but I also need to be able to talk to the individual sources, for example, to line up a phone call without distracting an on-air presenter who’s listening to their mix. My solution has been to rig 4 switched microphones into the desk so that I can talk to each individual remote source.
    It would be great, and also save me several inputs and a load of desk space, if there was an option for soft keys so that they could talk either to a single destination, or more usefully, if they had the kind of talk routing choices we have on the main talkback screen.

    Thanks

    Phil
    PS The desk is absolutely fantastic for this job otherwise!

    #90632
    Profile photo of SteffenRSteffenR
    Participant

    Hi Phil,

    since this is a very special situation I believe this will not happen in the near future…

    Maybe we can suggest you other ideas to solve your problem…

    try this:
    set up 4 Scenes
    one for each destination with blocking everything from recall except the “Sends to Aux” for the desired destinations
    now set your Talkback to an input channel and send it to the destinations
    now turn off the sends to the unwanted destination and save the state you want to a scene
    assign the scenes to a “User Button”

    hope this helps for the moment

    #90640
    Profile photo of Mike CMike C
    Participant

    I don’t have the mixer in front of me right now for a true test but it looks like on the mix APP using the IO patching, mix external in you can directly send the talk back to any mix out.

    So it looks like possibly having the mix APP IO menu open you could quickly route the talk back to any mix or mixes as needed.
    Using the iPad APP you would not need to be changing the menus on the surface.

    #90661
    Profile photo of Phil DriscollPhil Driscoll
    Participant

    Thanks for the input. Although this might be considered a special situation, say in the live sound arena, it’s absolutely bog standard in radio (and TV), so the feature would make SQ much more appealing in those areas.
    I can certainly choose which mixes to send talkback to, even on the talkback config screen, without running mix-app, but this and the scene suggestion are just too slow for live radio. Everything is happening so quickly, if you can’t dive straight on a button then you’re too late. My pile of switched mics is solving my problem for now, if a little inelegantly 🙂

    #90662
    Profile photo of SteffenRSteffenR
    Participant

    I know what you mean
    doin live transmissions as well

    #90668
    Profile photo of MarkPAmanMarkPAman
    Participant

    This does not go all the way, but, one mic, patched into 4 different channels and routed to the appropriate outputs would do the job. You could then put their mute buttons on softkeys, to have quick access all the time.

    Saves you 3 preamps, and a tangle of wires.

    #90675
    Profile photo of Mike CMike C
    Participant

    This would throw more hardware at the issue and be a little DIY project and maybe would work!

    For a project that never happened they were talking about having microphone mute buttons
    located at a conference room table to control what would have been a QU Pac.

    I found this MIDI control unit that takes switch contact closures latched or momentary and converts that to a MIDI control signal.
    Switch MIDI controller

    Not sure if there are any MIDI commands to select talk back routing or not.

    Using Marks idea of routing one input to four channels you could build up a box with
    four big buttons to hit to mute and un-mute channels as needed.

    #90679
    Profile photo of Phil DriscollPhil Driscoll
    Participant

    Thanks. MarkPAman’s solution does have the advantage of one button press to talk to an individual source, and retains the ‘press talk to talk to everyone’ I currently have. I’ll give it a whirl. The ‘turn the red light off to talk to this source’ element will be counter intuitive when someone else needs to operate the desk, but that won’t be happening for a while!

    Mike C, thanks – I had been mulling using midi and writing some software to implement some of the radio studio functionality I need. As well as the talkback routing, I also need to be able to turn the studio loudspeakers off when a mike channel is faded up, and add some more sophisticated monitoring controls – optional M&S on the meters, loudspeaker dim, loudspeaker cut L, cut R, mono to loudspeakers, polarity reverse one loudspeaker. All radio studio essentials which I implement with the Glensound monitoring unit in the picture. I suspect that at least the majority of these could be implemented by some cute routing, muting and soft key tricks.

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    #90686
    Profile photo of Phil DriscollPhil Driscoll
    Participant

    MarkPAman – used your suggestion today. Works a treat, and that’s 4 mics and cables off my desk 🙂

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    #90689
    Profile photo of Mike CMike C
    Participant

    The ‘turn the red light off to talk to this source’ element will be counter intuitive when someone else needs to operate the desk, but that won’t be happening for a while!

    Yea, light on channel mute or channel on can be counter intuitive for some and even more so if coming from a board that had channel on / off buttons that lighted is on.
    Actually during the production of the Allen Heath Mix Wizard series the channel mutes became channel on/off buttons!

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