[NeakmenterParticipant]

Thanks for these figures Jay – It’s nice to get some prodding and poking done by some people so we can do some elimination of factors and variables if problems arise!

BTW – I’ve moved my Dante card down to the MixRack and ran a separate cat5e from FOH to see if that helped with my console lag. It didn’t seem to make any appreciable difference. I was mainly concerned that somehow the Dante was bleeding into the GigaAce connection (the very early revision of the dante card firmware had a bug that would cause audio to be pushed over the Control port). I do have the latest firmware but wanted to be sure, and to see if removing that Surface Port’s audio bandwidth from the single cable would help. It doesn’t seem to.

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Jay! Thanks for that very informative post, sir! I was running my router at the stagerack end, but certainly good to bear in mind when there’s that much information sharing the bandwidth down the Gigaace cable… I do have my Dante card at the surface end though and that’s certainly a few more channels flying down that Gigaace connection, so maybe its worth trying it in the stagerack and running an extra cat5e from FOH for it.

Stale connections is definitely something to think on too. I’ll enable verbose logs tomorrow morning and Hawkeye over them after soundcheck.

Maybe i’ll also stick one of our new USB3 to Ethernet adapters on the qlab mac and try to put midi etc on that and keep Dante DVS on the built-in Ethernet. Not sure if I can restrict the a&h TCP midi driver to one particular NIC or not. Will have a play tomorrow.
I had been running one cable to the Dante card, then jumping out of the ‘control only’ Dante card’s port over to the ‘network’ port on the s3000 surface. I will also check the Dante card firmware revision as I notice on a quick re-read of the setup guide that an earlier firmware version would still be clogging up the “control only” port with audio…!

I would have loved to have had as much lead-in time as you to thoroughly test all aspects, but in the end, things didn’t work out that way for this particular show and I’ve had real crunch week to pull it all together and still have it a smooth experience for the band!

I’ll post updates as things progress.

Btw – a&h tech support have been very responsive over email and are having a look at a few things too. Kudos there.
N

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Sure – will do.

Thanks for the quick responses A&H! I’ll put it all in the email, but I was using DHCP mostly for the iPads. But as part of the fault-finding, I did try static ip addressing. Also, almost all the time, the mixrack would show up – named in the onemix “connect to” dialog. But I did also try connecting to the system’s fixed raw IP address to see if that was more stable – seemed the same…

I’ll fire that email off now.

[NeakmenterParticipant]

YES! You guys are the BEST! 🙂 Thanks Nicola!

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Had a look at this – and – nope – can’t find a way of doing this.
Maybe you could use stereo matrixes instead of mono, but just use one side of the routing. That way you can pan the send from the combined master to each of those busses. Is messy and wasteful of physical outputs and mix busses, but does get you kinda what you want?

BTW, have you noticed how the matrix sends seem to be POST FADE, but PRE the channel’s BALANCE/PAN. Means you have to set the balance/pan individually per send!? confused me for a minute why my master wasn’t panning. (I rarely take a feed straight to physical outputs from the master)

[NeakmenterParticipant]

At the moment with firmware 1.40 ONLY 1 physical surface console can be used per mixrack…

You can use a computer running director or an iPad running mixpad to act as a second console via software.

I believe that A&H are working on getting multiple consoles per mixrack on a future firmware release.

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Yeah – I have been touring the ls9 for several tours here. This work with the DLive is trialling for upgrades accross 4-5 tours.
The ls9s are good workhorses on a budget and have been around for a long time now.
But the lack of per channel scoping on them… and the lack of mixes…
64 channels is quite nice, but I had to use two of the desks (kinda monitors ish and foh ish) – very time consuming setup and a stage-wing area that looked like a jumble sale of connections.

The dlive mix rack is a much nicer solution here and gives me the channel count I need at a great price point. All other aspects of the desk are great. Just this one issue is putting serious restrictions on achieving what I want to do for my bands!

Just about to do a post about some experiences with the desk during the first day setup and rehearsals.

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Thanks again for your thoughts! It’s nice that someone takes the time here for someone else’s problems!

Righto, the final setup I’ve gone for is this:

I have a vocal group and an instrument group for each guy. The drums have 4 groups “kick, snare, toms, cymbals”
And the keys have a group too.

Instead of feeding back down to the input channels for their own instruments, they’re all gonna use the groups.

I’ve sacrificed some matrix and fx busses to allow for a second copy of each of the drums and keyboard groups – these will be where the input channels route when the “other guy” takes over those instruments. Means that everyone has to set their drums and keys levels in two different places but it should be good enough.

This way I can scene the input channels to group sends off and on without messing with the group to aux send levels.

Once more, would all be solved if the recal filter could see the routing on/off separate from the routing level. (I think even ls9 has that level of focus available!)

Thanks again and wish me luck for tomorrow – hope the band likes it!

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Hi tor, thanks for your response! I’m using the me-U/me-1 systems on another tour, they’re also great, but less so for this band as the guys change positions so much and the me systems need cat5 and audio return xlrs which keeps them stuck in one position. With the ipads, they’re wireless, and the guys can log in to their mix from any position when they move.

It’s frustrating as I’ve tried many ways to workaround (even trying to control send on/off via qlab, but A&h midi spec doesn’t include that control!)

Perhaps Nicola could suggest splitting these two aspects of “routing” in a future firmware!
🙂

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Lookin forward to it! Good work so far, sir!

(just hope you get a dB indicator on the rotaries in in time!) 🙂

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Just saying – A&H are really becoming awesome indeed.

It was a shame I had such a hard time with the original V1 iLive console interface. It put me off for a long time. It actually was a fantastic system once the software was upgraded. I guess it was just difficult having it offered at a major festival as a “would you like to try this”… festival main stages as a middle-on artist are no place to be trying new things!

Yes, now I think it makes so much sense to have the processing on the stage with the inputs, all the band’s equipment and the MD’s midi controllers and much else (q-lab/catalyst etc) – most of us only need or want control at FOH (or with ipads around the venue!).

C Class looks like a great option for the mid level music-in-theatres type shows I’m looking after at the moment. Tons of channels and mixes at an awesome price with loads of IO.

To the earlier poster whining about a lack of local IO at the surface… I thought that’s what the DX expanders could be used for?! 😉

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Yet again, your speedy response is appreciated! Makes me wonder if you ever sleep!

Also thank you for being open with an unsupported workaround.

I will take note of the caveats, but this does seem to be a suitable solution!

Thank you very much A&H/Nicola!

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Excellent work guys!

It was indeed the first “purchase” download of the app for me.

This fix works for me – purchase the app on iTunes, then go to download on the iPad – it does indeed offer the “last compatible version” for my particular IOS version.

Thankyou very much for your rapid responses!

Neak.

[NeakmenterParticipant]

Hi Nic. Thanks for the very rapid response!
I’m afraid that the App Store doesn’t offer the “last compatible version” like it usually does for most apps. It simply insists that “This application requires IOS 9.0 or later – you must update to IOS 9.0 in order to download and use this application” – it doesn’t offer any other options!

Has A&H actively removed the 1.93 version from the store?

Bizarrely, the “mixpad offline” app does download fine.

This is on iPad Mini 2 32GB with IOS 8.4.1

[Author]

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