[Mr. OldschoolParticipant]

Basically, the fx send is where you select what sources you want to go to your onboard fx, like reverb. The fx return is what sets how much of that effect goes out in the main mix. So for instance, if you wanted a good amount of reverb on your mics and a medium amount on your guitars, you would select your reverb fx send, set the fader for your mics at a higher level and the fader for your guitars at a somewhat lower level. Then you would go to your main mix and bring up the fx return for your reverb to the level you like. If the level is good for the mics but not for the guitars, select the sends for the reverb again and adjust only the guitar level.

If I’m forgetting something, I’m sure one of the other guys will explain it. I don’t tend to like fx, so I avoid using much at all.

[Mr. OldschoolParticipant]

We use an iPad. The guy that did our equipment installation said he had heard that A&H support for Android based tablets may be going away, but I have no confirmation of that.

[Mr. OldschoolParticipant]

I will likely turn off the 2.4 next, but I would have had to interrupt the musicians at their practice to effect that switch last night. At the end of the night I was able to make sure they all could access it.

My phone is Android, so I can look up those analyzer apps.

Thanks for your help. I will post back here as I make progress with this.

[Mr. OldschoolParticipant]

I have no idea what happened to my post. I had written a response to @volunteer and I think I was editing a typo and all of a sudden my text window shut down and my rather lengthy reply was gone. I didn’t think I had hit any kind of delete post button, and if I did, those thing are supposed to have a safety where they confirm you want to delete.
Anyway, I agree that it doesn’t appear that there was a very good job done in clearly specifying what it needed to do. I wasn’t involved in that. Taking the iPad down the hall is me pushing the limits to see how far they will go, it was never designed in. The router’s dropouts are the key problem at this point.

At today’s rehearsal, I was able to get into the router’s setup and poke around. Whoever initially set it up had turned the 5G off entirely. Netgear doesn’t have the most intuitive interface, but I was eventually able to get it turned on and logged into it with the iPad. How it will work on Sunday remains to be seen, but we are able to use the 5G range. I haven’t made it go stealth yet because I didn’t have time to walk everybody through getting set up on it, so I’m going to do this in steps until the results are satisfactory.

One concern I have is that some of our internet routers are also set on 5G, so there may be interference anyway(?) I think I should be able to talk to our volunteer that works on our network equipment about specifying non-competing channels to set them at. Does that sound right, or am I over-simplifying what can be done?

[Mr. OldschoolParticipant]

Thank you! I really appreciate your detailed and straight forward explanation. I think I understand enough to follow what you are saying.
On the underside of the router, on the left there is a user name and default password which match what it says in the user manual. On the right, it lists the serial number, mac address, SSID, and a different password. I’m taking a wild guess that the right side is the default standard user password, and the left is the default admin password, which is the one I need. Unfortunately, I already tried it amd it didn’t work, which means it was changed at or after installation. I haven’t seen the hard reset button, but I’m not there right now to look again. I will be back to it on Thursday, so I can try to get an early start before rehearsal and maybe get things going. I’m assuming that when I do the hard reset I will have to redo the user password too, and I can do all of this in the browser window, right? In theory, we are thinking I can tell the router to only do 5Ghz (thanks for clarifying about wifi vs cell), and that I should be able to tell the router to not broadcast itself (is that like when my computer asks if I want it to be discoverable?). Once I have it hidden, people can still locate it by manually searching for the network name in their wifi settings on their phones, correct?

Would the IP address be the same for the desk and the router, or is that where they would be the same to a point and then end with a different digit or two?

I really appreciate the help. Yes we do have computer volunteers who know network equipment, but they are afraid to touch the new sound equipment which is my department. I did have a conversation with one of them today about getting some help working on the router when I found that I couldn’t log into it.

In reaponse to @volunteer, I’m not sure what NFR means. I was on sabbatical at the time the church decided now was the time to upgrade. As my handle implies, I am a rather oldschool sort and was reluctant to move from analog to digital for years. The elders eventually decided that they wanted new digital stuff anyway, but they did keep me included in the planning process. Coming from a 36 channel GL3300, I asked them to get an SQ-7 because I wanted more faders. They made contact with a guy from upstate that had some hotshot qualifications who came down, looked at our setup, and made some recommendations. I wasn’t there for that meeting, and was very wary of these “hotshots”, of which there have been plenty over the years, and they always want to sell us a Bentley when we can barely afford a Pinto, and they “are the only ones who can fix all of our problems”. He made his pitch to some of our elders and deacons, they discussed what he said to them with me, I advised caution, they went back to him and said they were interested in a basic setup that would replace our console, our house speakers, and the snake to the stage. He came back with a revised estimate that was significantly higher than what he initially had said it would be. They decided to go ahead anyway and tried to reassure me that it was still within what they had budgeted. The installation went forward, and I was invited to meet with the guy so he could show me how it worked. At this point I found out that he had sold us an SQ-6 instead of a 7, but the 6 is sufficient as long as I lay things out reasonably in one of the custom layers, and I will readily admit that many of the onboard tools in this board exceed my expectations. I am quite happy with it, and it is tons easier to train new people on. The guy (and I’m deliberately not using names) did a reasonable job of explaining things. I was not overly thrilled with how he set things up, and have had to fix some of that. Like most of these type of people, he’s quite adept at talking about how great he is and how successful his work has been both in installing equipment, and in training people. I don’t tend to impress too easily. He does seem to know what he’s doing, but he also makes plenty of mistakes along the way, and he pushes what he thinks is a good sound pretty hard. I tend to use far less fx than he likes, and I know what kind of audience we have at my church… So to make a long story short (too late!) yes he did show and explain the equipment, we sort of had a discussion about our needs, and he did hang around long enough to make sure we could use it. As I said before though, that was under the cover of lockdown, so it was a few weeks later when we started having troubles. It was even longer before my iPad was delivered and I got to see firsthand the difficulties the musicians were having with getting booted off. By that time he had gone off somewhere else. We did have to have him come back to fix that he hadn’t given us enough monitor channels at the stage head, but any time you talk to this guy it costs money and I can’t say I am totally confident of the results, so I would rather figure it out for myself with the help of all of you who I figure have probably been through this before.

Whew! Time to catch my breath!

[Mr. OldschoolParticipant]

I don’t think we have an extender.

I have tried searching through the forums for previous threads discussing this topic and I couldn’t find anything that seemed applicable.

Again, networking is not something that I really lnow much about. I don’t know how to measure for interference. I also don’t know what factors to consider or disregard in order to assess what our needs are. What I have been able to find so far is that the apps tend to bail out if the signal dips at all. Since I can see that the signal strength is fluctuating, it looks to me like that is a good place to start with trying to figure out why we keep losing connection.

[Mr. OldschoolParticipant]

Our worship team is typically 5 people, but can be bigger by one or two. I have MixPad on the iPad and on my phone, but I really only use my phone as a last ditch option because the controls are too small for me. Mainly I use it to monitor the wifi signal strength, which is where I have observed wild fluctuations. Hence my first assumption is that the problem is an inconsistent router. Is there any way around that limit to users?

[Mr. OldschoolParticipant]

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

First of all let me clarify that, while I am pretty computer savvy, networking is not a strength of mine. My sound engineering experience stems from learning on the job, so to speak, but I have been doing this particular position at my church for 13+ years and have a good reputation for my “ear” for sound. This is to say that highly technical talk of networking or sound engineering can befuddle me. I would say I understand the sound engineering side better than the networking side by a wide margin, but just want to make sure people realize I’m homegrown.

So going back to the questions some of you asked. Why do we have this router? Because the guy we bought the desk from included it. He never really hung around to observe how it performed once we got up and running, and the installation took place during quarantine, so he was not really here when we had congregants to speak of. He knows his sound equipment well enough, but he had no comment regarding the router.

The router was originally installed back at the desk at the back of the sanctuary, maybe 25 feet from the platform. Howevere we were getting interference from a lighting transformer pack that was about 3 feet away on the back wall. When that was determined, we moved the router to the stage head on the platform. We had a backup cat6 installed along with the new board, and we used that to connect the router to the board. That places all of the musicians within a 15 foot range from the router, and my iPad about 30 feet diagonally across the room. During sound checks, I carry the iPad back about 50 or 60 feet down a hallway to our overflow room. If I stay in the hallway, the signal usually doesn’t drop any more than maybe once, but some days it is obstinate and won’t reconnect until I walk it all the way back to about 15 feet from the router.

During our rehearsals and sound checks Sunday mornings, there isn’t usually as much trouble, but some days are better than others. Once we get people in the sanctuary, the iPad sometimes becomes unusable. There is no internet connected to the sound router, and the security key is privately only known by the worship team, so I know we aren’t getting extra people connecting to the router, and they would get nothing from such a connection.

As far as other transmitting things in the room, we have two wireless mics, and a wireless heaeing aid system from Williams Sound that must be 20 years old or more. The only other wireless stuff would be the 4 or 5 internet routers we have in various locations throughout the church and of course everyone’s phones. Lastly, during our services, our security team uses walkie talkies.

I have no idea if our router even has the ability to switch between frequency ranges, but I thought that 5g was a cellular protocol, not a wifi protocol.

Digging through the settings on the board, it does appear that we have been set up with a static IP.

Hopefully that gives enough information at least to start with. If there is more specific information needed, please ask away.

Thanks again, everyone!

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