[AnaParticipant]

What about Dante?

There’s a 128 x 128 at 96khz PCIe card available since dante’s inception – surely its easy enough to make this card work?

[AnaParticipant]

Thanks Nicola for that.

If there is any chance you could put me in touch with those that have had this working that would be great.

[AnaParticipant]

Because there is a control network and a Dante network that need VLAN’s so wifi can be used for control and not be flooded with potential multicast information from Dante sends.

There would also be no redundancy for the long fibre run’s in that set up.

I have media converters for a simplified setup for less vital situations like you suggest.

Also if i want to fully expand the GLD using AR2412 – AB168 and AR84 i would another 2 channels of fibre to make use of the surface expansion slot.

[AnaParticipant]

+1 it’s too slow at doing its job, you can clearly here it fade as its missed the first word of a new speaker. I think nom is a little quicker than the classic, but both far too slow.

I regularly use the waves Dugan auto mixer and it is outstanding, when I heard about the release of AMM I wondered if I had wasted my money. Absolutely not, worth every penny.

[AnaParticipant]

The only difference between direct out (set to post preamp) and using Input sockets for record is the Surface Trim. If the trim is set to 0 there should be no difference.

The issue with using direct outs in the explained manner when you punch the recorded channels back through the GLD for a virtual sound check is that the surface trim is potentially applied twice to the signal.

This may not apply if not using the surface trim at all, but using the sockets for recording in this manner is more correct for virtual sound check. As the audio is coming from for recording and returning to for playback to the exact same position in the signal chain.

I use a very large dante system for live use (6 or more devices with 70+ channels and multiple hops per signal path) and there is no lack of documentation available. If you read the Audinate documentation thoroughly as well as the documentation for the devices it is clear and easy.

But if you are trying to run 2 clocks on one system (where point 1 is valid) by telling the dante card to be the master of the dante network (or to be slaved from the network) and the GLD to master the dante card you will cause pops and crackles. But this has been a consideration since the beginnings of combining digital audio devices together.
If you want to use the GLD as master, you can change the option in the dante controller to slave the dante card to the GLD (‘Enable Sync To External’). Either this or slaving the GLD to the dante card as suggested in this thread solves the issue of having 2 clocks trying to get along.

Furthermore, the Allen Heath manual for the M-DANTE suggests to set it up in this manner, from the manual:

Dante cards Use Dante Controller to tick ‘Preferred master’ and ‘Slave
to external wordclock’ for the Master MixRack/console card only.

For some reason you have copied only a portion of this sentence from the manual and turned it on its head, saying the console should be slaved to the Dante card, however the sentence is suggesting the card (and hence the dante network) should be salved to the console. Either way though will work. The manual is not an ILive manual, but the manual for the M-Dante card and it encompasses the I-LIVE, GLD and MEU.

For point 3, the virtual soundcard will show the green speaker in the receive tab of its device view when receiving above -61dbFS, as stated in the manual. There has been an issue with macbooks and the use of thunderbolt ethernet adapters that has been resolved, this may have prevented this from working, as stated in the dante controller change log.

All documentation always suggest keeping firmware and software up to date.

Signal will still pass despite version differences with Dante, there has never been a version incompatibility that will stop audio. Wrong versions in the past would only limit information in the device view window and newly added features, however you can still subscribe to channels. It is more likely there was a setting incorrect to prevent signal from passing.

I think the statement that there is a lack of documentation is unfair, nor is it hard to find, as it comes with the M-Dante card, and with the Dante controller/virtual sound card.

Nothing suggested here is unavailable in the manuals. Even the fact that the ‘input socket’ are the preamp output is clear when you hit the help (?) on the i/o page of the GLD.

Its unfair to manufacturers to claim there is a lack of documentation, when its more clearly a lack of thorough reading.

Ben

[AnaParticipant]

If you want to use a daw for this application, Ableton live would be the go. There was an article in SOS in Aus about this, the engineer for the Sydney Opera house uses Ableton live to host the plugins he wants to use for the orchestra, controls the plugins via lemur and its running from an SD7.

Noise can occur when there is a clocking problem on the Dante network, typically setting the GLD to source its clock from the Dante Card, rather than internally is the best option. I clock my entire Dante network with a Black Lion Micro Clock via the Rednet 3, and the Dante clock monitor shows absolutely 0 variation in the clock offsets for each device.

Make sure your sample rate is set at 48khz as well, and also if the cpu is overloading you will get these artifacts due to dropped samples and multirack clearly shows cpu overload at the top when this happens. increasing the i/o buffer significantly reduces the load on the CPU. On my pc i am able to run about 150 power hungry plugins before it overloads on a 32 i/o, but it is top of the range hardware. I imagine the mac mini would be capable of far less.

Multirack is solid as a rock if everything is up to date, it is extremely well programmed and will let you know when you are out of processing power to add more plugins. There are also more and more software programs propping up written for this application that are not limited to waves plugs, and a google search will reveal these.

I had the looping issue for a particular version of Rednet pci Drivers. Typically on a mac, two or more different programs can access the same inputs from a device, however with one driver version when a second program attempted to access the inputs from the pci card it would create a loop. However newer drivers fixed this issue. I record the same inputs as the waves multiracks use, so Logic and Multirack share the same inputs.

The other option is that the Rednet pci card is compatible with certain thunderbolt pcie enclosures. There is no sacrifice in latency as the thunderbolt port is in essence an extension of the pcie bus of the motherboard.

Multirack has delay groups to maintain even latency between certain channels, despite all having different plugins and different amounts of sample delay. It simply moves them all to the largest delay.

Perhaps look at other software that hosts non waves plugins, but still with the dante back bone. Dante is easily the best audio over IP architecture and is quickly been adopted by many manufacturers. I was at the same juncture when choosing between the waves card and Dante years ago, and Dante has proven all ready to be the more future proof option. Have a look at the Audinate website at how many manufacturers use dante, and they all work together no questions asked.

Hope that helps

Ben

[AnaParticipant]

Hi, i use a setup like this. My hardware includes 2xGLD80’s with dante cards, Focusrite Rednet PCI, Focusrite Rednet 3 for a 32 channel snake, and a system running DVS.

It allows me to have 96 mix channels and insane amounts of DSP. I use this setup for theatre, one GLD for the band and the other for mics and master matrix outs etc etc.

As far as latency, you need the pci card for sure, i made a detailed analysis of the latency steps in this post on the prosound web forums here: https://forums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/topic,141889.msg1367870.html#msg1367870

The latency of DANTE trumps the waves system for sure, and allows for much more integration of 3rd party hardware.

Hope that helps

Ben

[AnaParticipant]

Hi Luca, we are lucky enough to have a close relationship with the A&H dealer in my area so he loaned us a GLD while the other was being repaired free of charge. I did time the repair in a Month that it would not be used in the hope that i would not need to lend a console, surely 4 weeks is enough to do a 1 hour job that the dealer could have easily done??

However it took 2 months for the Fix to be done, as well as a lot of phone calls and emails to TAG (Aus distributor) and the company doing the repair from both myself and the A&H dealer asking what the hell is going on. I calculated that if i had to hire a console for every gig i did not have it in this time it would have cost me about $1500.

Furthermore, the company tried to make me pay for it. I told them it was under warranty from a factory default and my dealer made sure they paid for all of the freight costs.
The only saving grace was that when i asked them to pull out the DANTE card and send it to me as i needed it to link 2 GLD’s and many other dante devices, and it would save rebuilding the DANTE network when i wanted to sub the repaired desk into a show it turned up the next morning.

Last but not least, there is a loose screw floating around inside the GLD i noticed straight away when we got it back, so what do i do about this? :/

I was initially impressed by the communication of the A&H tech support, TAG was good in that they recommended an authorised repairer much closer in the hope that the repair turnaround was fast however they were little help in ensuring the repair took place. It still took 3 weeks for the desk to turn up after i kicked up a fuss, and continued to question what was going on.

What are the inconsistencies with the A&H warranty John?

[AnaParticipant]

After contacting Tech Support it looks like my console needs a new hard drive.

My screen never went completely blank and i haven’t had to reset the console for it to recover.

If anyone has any sort of freeze contact Tech support asap, dont wait for it to happen again like i did.
In the end letting tech support know asap will help A&H help us with these sorts of issues.

Ben Anderson

[AnaParticipant]

Had another short freeze today, lasted about 15 seconds or so.

Will send the log through to A&H, i cant see any errors in it though? unless theres more detail in one of those files somewhere.

Definitely not related to having too much control input, i pressed one button and it froze.

Ben Anderson

[AnaParticipant]

Hi All, i have had several occurrences of the desk locking up for various periods of times over the last year or so and most recently on friday night.

What i have gathered:
It has only done it with for shows where i am using a large amount of scenes. Current show has about 240 scene’s. Never if its a pub gig where scenes are not used.
Locks for anywhere between 10 seconds up to about a minute, then kicks in.
Control surface is completely unresponsive during this time but audio will still pass kick on.
It is somewhat rare, although i did have one show last year where it would happen almost every show, but the console was only being used for the band so i was lucky enough for it not to have a big impact on the show at all. I believe half way through the season there was a firmware release that fixed some issue’s with freezing on scene change, but had no effect for me.
Has happened in v1.2, v1.3 and now v1.4.

I will switch the console out this week for another, and also perhaps have the laptop connected for the shows in hope that if it does freeze i can at least keep using the soft buttons to cycle scenes.

Haven’t saved or looked at the log as yet :/ are they saved for long periods of time?

Also, i have a usb plugged in and load the show off of that each day. Perhaps i will just load the show and unplug it this time.

Hope we can get this resolved!

Ben Anderson

[Author]

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