Midas Pro6 Clock Failure?

K

Kip Conner

Junior
Mar 13, 2011
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Athens, GA
I won't divulge the name of the band or the engineers that were at the helm of this show. That part isn't important. The show was carrying a Midas Pro6 in Monitor land and a Digi console at FOH. The snake lines were digital via BNC I assume.

During the show the clock on the Midas failed and it shut down both consoles. When the desk was restarted I heard the monitor engineer say that it would probably happen again.

What's that all about? Is this a known issue on these Midas desks?
 
Re: Midas Pro6 Clock Failure?

Greg Cameron said:
Sounds like a good reason to use an external clock instead of locking to another desk.
Click to expand...

Why?

To me it sounds like a good reason to use an analog split.

Clocking networks can be troublesome, as our video colleagues have been experiencing for decades now. Why should we clock more than one console to a common clock when it's not required? To me it doesn't matter if the common clock is a desk clock or an external clock. When the clock fails, everything locked to that clock fails.
 
Re: Midas Pro6 Clock Failure?

Hi Kip,

As far as I'm aware we have never had a physical clock fail on one of our consoles. So this is definitely not a 'known issue'.

Without the details and specifics of how the two systems were connected its hard to know exactly what happened here. If the PRO6 was sharing input channels with a Digi (Avid?) console its almost definite that a DN9650 was involved somewhere in the chain. As there would need to be a conversion between our 96kHz AES50 protocol and MADI. At this point the two consoles would actually be on separate clocks anyway, as the DN9650 acts as a bridge between the two systems allowing each one to clock from its own source. Whether the Digi was acting as the MADI sides master or the DN9650 was wouldn't really matter. Where the Digi console was being fed its signal from on the PRO6 system would have an effect on the circumstances it would lose the inputs coming from PRO6. Whether DL431 mic splitters were part of the system would also offer a different set of options here too.

Reasons for audio stopping on both consoles could be many, a simple CAT5 or RJ45 connector problem could be the cause. In my experience many of this type of problem end up coming down to simple cable/connector issues. But like I said without knowing details of the situation and the system I can only speculate.

I just wanted to make clear that clock failures are definitely not a frequent or known issue. Please feel free to PM if you'd like to.

Thanks for your time.
 
Re: Midas Pro6 Clock Failure?

Let me restate: if you're going to use a digital snake, it might be a good reason to use an external clock instead of a desk clock. Chances of a desk crashing or needing a reboot seem much higher than a clock going down. By all means, use a copper split.
 
Re: Midas Pro6 Clock Failure?

Greg Cameron said:
Let me restate: if you're going to use a digital snake, it might be a good reason to use an external clock instead of a desk clock. Chances of a desk crashing or needing a reboot seem much higher than a clock going down. By all means, use a copper split.
Click to expand...
Maybe an external clock can be of advantage due to more robust cabling, but I doubt it. It's just one more unit that can fail and it's not really clocking the consoles.
Clock external when you have to, not when you are capable of doing it. There are so many things in our business that can go wrong during a show, the environment is hostile most of the time. So I try to keep down failure sources to the minimum, especially the single points of failure.
 
Re: Midas Pro6 Clock Failure?

The particular show in question is using a Big Ben as a master clock. There was a power failure to the Big Ben which caused the audio to go down. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I think that there was a faulty Furman rack unit that caused the problem. Maybe Mr. Tepfer is right about not having an external clock unless it is necessary.

Early on with this Pro6/Digi (Avid) package there were random digital pops happening on the digi(Avid) side. Our first thought was to make sure everything was clocked correctly, and so we switched to an external clock. However that wasn't really our issue. We were using MADI with a coaxial snake that was at the maximum length for that particular protocol. When we shortened the snake down to 250 ft, our problems were solved, and we ended up keeping the external clock as everything was working perfectly.
 
Re: Midas Pro6 Clock Failure?

And there you go. It comes down to the true weakest link in the chain! Thanks for the clarification and the update. Show sounded great by the way. I had never heard the band before and given all the obstacles of the day you guys did a fantastic job.
 
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