[ElphieParticipant]

After a few demos with borrowed iPads, I started using the app today on my new iPad (aka iPad 3) and found it to be quite stable, within reason. I used it at our church, which is held in a gymatorium. We had 2 iPads and a T112 connected to an iDR48. The only issue that occurred for me was the message “The Wifi connectivity has been restored” once most of the congregation arrived. As an IT professional in my real life, it’s clear to me that this would be related to the increasingly crowded wifi-hostile environment that arose once the punters arrived. The 200+ people and several phone/wifi hotspots certainly added another degree of crowding to the already busy 2.4Ghz band in our venue.

My personal experience leads me to think that the A&H iPad app doesn’t like a poor quality network of any sort. Neither does the iLive editor app on my laptop. Any application where latency is paramount will have issues when the network degrades. I would suggest that the key to making the iPad app work is to deploy a robust network with decent strength and latency. That means real wifi hardware, like a distributed group of Cisco APs or something in that category. D-Link, whilst nice gear, is not in that category.

There could be the potential for A&H to tweak the app to handle wifi issues better. A better error message than “The Wifi connectivity has been restored”, when technically wifi connectivity wasn’t lost but was degraded, would be a good start. More detailed log errors would be helpful too. I’m not an app coder, but anything is possible.

I should say the app was great for our purposes. Even after a short time using it, it’s already become a valuable part of our operations. We use the iPads primarily for monitor mixing, but occasionally for FOH duties. As we always setup out T112, that’s our primary method of control. If you want the most reliable control solution, get a surface and some decent cat5. That’s why A&H sell them.

However, as we can’t afford Cisco any time soon, I’ll be configuring our cheaper router to the less-crowded 5ghz band and adding some high gain antennas.

Cheers,
Michael

[ElphieParticipant]

Great work, thanks!

[ElphieParticipant]

pm sent. Well, an email anyway. Call anytime.

[ElphieParticipant]

Thanks for the new documentation. Time to go shopping for a better router.

Cheers,
Michael

[ElphieParticipant]

Hi Antony,

Not refering to ganging, I’m refering to making 2 mono channels a stereo. If the two mono channels have different head amp settings prior to being turned into a single stereo channel, the left and right on the new stereo channel have different settings (which you’ve said). What I’ve found is that changing the PAD, phantom and gain settings for the new stereo channel does not change both sides of the new stereo channel. What I’ve found is that when a change is made to the head amp gain, the change in value is plus or minus from the original value of the head amp gain in the previous mono channels, rather than an absolute value for the new stereo channel. At the time we found changing the values for head amp gain, phantom power and pad only efffected the left channel when these settings were originally different on the two mono channels. Does my explanation make sense? I realise it’s a bit hard to put into text!

It’s a very minor issue that we only experienced before we planned our channel assignments better. It was when we changed from having two separate mono keyboard channels for 2 different devices into 1 new stereo channel for one keyboard. As a church, we’re constantly changing our band line up from week to week and this was the solution we came up with at the time. Now we just plan with spare channels.

As I mentioned, I’ll try and replicate the issue when I get the chance. We haven’t needed to change a channel since we upgraded to v1.8.

ps this is the best audio console I’ve ever used.

[ElphieParticipant]

I’ve noticed a similar issue when linking two monos to stereo. Unless the head amp gain are both set to the same level before the linking, there is an imbalance once linked. I’ve also had the same PAD issue described above. Also noticed a similar issue with phantom power. We had these issues occur several times when using v1.7 firmware but have not had to make a change since upgrading to v1.8. We simply plan around it.

These issues only arise when creating a stereo channel from 2 mono channels that previously had different head amp settings. It seems whatever the odd channel (as in an odd number 1,3,5,7,etc) settings are, the settings are not copied over to the even channel.

Is this a product feature or a bug? Changing the head amp settings (level, pad, phantom power) did not make any change at the time.

If I get a chance, I’ll try it with v1.82 and let you know. Also happy for someone to say they found the solution when they RTFM. I couldn’t find one.

Cheers,
Michael

[ElphieParticipant]

The readme file for version 1.8 says that you can only downgrade to firmware version 1.72 but I can’t seem to locate it. I’m happy to update but I’d prefer to have a backout plan before committing.

Cheers,
Michael

[ElphieParticipant]

very happy!

[ElphieParticipant]

It does say in the update notes in the App Store that the update requires firmware v1.8. If you don’t have that firmware version, why update? Also, the update may just be a compatibility fix, like the current version was when the v1.71 firmware came out. Not every update brings new features in software land But it does mean that v1.8 is on its way…

(sorry, I spent too many years in IT telling people to RTFM)

Cheers,
Michael

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