X32 Discussion

[Nick Simon]

Re: X32 Discussion

Nick, Congrats on catching the audio bug, it will consume your life.

Oh, I've had it, since I was about 12.. but just not that much experience in combat on decent systems.. Not a whole lot to running a 16-24 channel board with 6 sends, 2-4 aux subs, an eq, an effects rack, a couple SP speaker cabs, and a couple wedges. Mama could do it...~:-D~:grin:

 

[Nick Simon]

Re: NOOB!

"Aux fed subs" is a basic mixing concept that goes back forever to the simplest analog consoles. You just use an aux bus to send the signal to your sub-woofers from each channel, as opposed to taking the sub signal from the main PA output. Thus you only get sub on the things that need it, like kick drum, bass, keys, music playback, etc. You don't get it on things that DON'T need it, like vocals, and especially spoken word mics, like a podium mic. The result is a much cleaner, punchier sound.

Mick Berg.

Thanks Mick, I think I get the concept. I went to see 3 Days Grace & Chevelle a year or so ago, and I think they must have been using this application, because I never heard / felt subs fire like that before. It seemed like they had their own volume control without raising the overall db (which was already about 98+). There were certain parts of songs when they would hit a bass note down below say 70 hz and it would vibrate your innards without raising the high end, if that makes sense....

 

[Nick Simon]

Re: NOOB!

Welcome Nick. I would not try to over think things. The x32 is pretty straight forward. Watch the videos on Youtube (the Behringer videos from their webinars are a great place to start) and get a grip on all the functions. Play with the xcontrol and set up some aux sends and learn how to get to the channel dynamics and eq. I stepped onto the x32 and was up and running in less than 5 minutes. I did have the advantage of having used digital boards before but they are all different so I am not sure how much of an advantage that really was. I have been an analogue guy for almost ever and I found this an easy transition for me. In many ways, once you get used to it, you will find the internal routing to be a blessing. You should feel free to ask questions as I think many here will be glad to help you. Best of luck to you when you get to play with it.

Thanks Tim! I have watched a bunch of the vids and read hundreds (literally, including the quick start manual) of pages, and thought I had a good general understanding, but when I got the XControl to play with it, I kinda got overwhelmed. I've just got to figure out how it makes sense to me. I figure I'll be running vocals , keys, guitars on level 1, drums and everything else on level 2. They will go to aux levels for drums , guitars, vox, etc., then mons on the next level aux subs. just not sure how to insert effects on the channel or assign to the sub. probably the guy who sets the system up will have it sorted out and I can tweak it from there if need be.. I don't understand DCAs at all... I think I have a hint, but I'm not sure.... hopefully y'all won't have to babysit me long...lol

 

[drew gandy]

Re: Headphone jacks

The other day I had a pair of headphones plugged in and they were working fine using the jacks on the end caps. I plugged a second set of headphones into the jack on the other side and when I did that, the volume was significantly reduced in the headphones to about half and I lost the stereo mix and only one side of each headphone had audio coming through.

Has anyone else had this problem or have any recommendations on how to fix this? Perhaps this is just normal?

thanks in advance!

karl

Interesting. I tried plugging 2 sets of cans in at the same time and didn't notice any change in level. I started to think that maybe there were actually independent headphone amps (one for each jack) but that doesn't really make economic sense. I think you've confirmed that they are actually just tied together off one amp. And I suspect that one of your sets of cans has a wiring problem. Likely a short somewhere.
While on the topic of the headphone output, I concur that there needs to be some kind of gain adjustment somewhere in the cue bus path. I have found the output level of the main mix to be decent if you're driving the board to near full output but for cueing individual channels there's not enough gain. Especially if it's a quiet source (like a spoken word mic 3 feet away from a whisperer). I'm used to having an independent control for the solo bus so you can adjust it relative to cueing up a complete mix.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Re: NOOB!

Thanks Tim! I have watched a bunch of the vids and read hundreds (literally, including the quick start manual) of pages, and thought I had a good general understanding, but when I got the XControl to play with it, I kinda got overwhelmed. I've just got to figure out how it makes sense to me. I figure I'll be running vocals , keys, guitars on level 1, drums and everything else on level 2. They will go to aux levels for drums , guitars, vox, etc., then mons on the next level aux subs. just not sure how to insert effects on the channel or assign to the sub. probably the guy who sets the system up will have it sorted out and I can tweak it from there if need be.. I don't understand DCAs at all... I think I have a hint, but I'm not sure.... hopefully y'all won't have to babysit me long...lol

Nick,I too am a newcomer both to this board and to digital mixing; having only every run analogue consoles. (I guess with the exception of digital 'in-the-box' mixing and routing in Pro Tools).
I have found this forum and this thread in particular very informative for picking up the tricks and tips for running digital boards.

Think of a DCA as an assignable remote control for various inputs; it is not an audio path.
If you assign, say, all your drum kit mics to DCA1, then moving DCA1 fader up or down would be the equivalent of grabbing all 7 or 8 faders and moving them up and down at the same time, keeping their relative ratios between each other the same.
The audio isn't summed at the DCA so you can't apply any processing to it or EQ it as a group. It's just an assignable remote control for the faders that are assigned to it.

This differs from a sub group, which is an audio path and the audio signals that you assign to it are summed at the group master. This allows you to assign, say, all your drum kit inputs, or the whole kit except kick and snare, and then apply some compression or EQ to that whole group of inputs. For this to work, you take the signal from those channels out of the main LR bus, assign them to say, sub group 1, then put sub group 1's output into the main LR bus.This means no signal goes directly from your eg. rack tom mic out to the LR, it goes from you channel fader, through the group fader, then into the main LR.

This lets you group up all your instruments and apply some group based compression to each, while maybe relaxing the compression on the vocals for eg. This will help keep the vocals on top of the mix.
Dave Rat (search on youtube) has a great video explaining this technique.

The 16 busses on the x32 are configurable between pre-fade outs (for your foldback sends if mixing monitors from FOH), sub groups (for routing your inputs into groups for group-based processing) and post-fade outs (for sending to effects).
The 8 DCAs are seperate to this.

I think where you say "They will go to aux levels for drums , guitars, vox, etc" you mean sub groups, and " then mons on the next level aux subs" you mean pre-fade sends.If you don't want to apply group based processing, you could skip using the sub groups and just mix with the DCAs.

Hope that helps. . I'm still learning it all myself!

Cheers,Ryan

 

[Paul Mirtschin]

Re: Protected Scenes

Can any one of you geniuses out there suggest a way that I can have a default scene, that can't be overwritten except my me, that the maintenance crew can recall with just one button press (or two at the most), if they screw up the settings?

The closest I can think of (at the moment) is to have a default scene or two saved to both desk and USB, that way you need to manually go back and save over that default, and if that happens, it is on the key, which needs some serious manual messing with to save over.

If anyone manages to do both those things, take away their desk licence, chances are they are causing trouble elsewhere by playing with things they shouldn't.

I have a default "custom boot scene" saved to both locations, at least one is always "safe".

 

[brian kozicki]

Re: ipad eq

I compared the response of the eq on the x32 screen with the ipad, they really do differ quite a bit. Can or will this be improved in future?
Also the separate controls, for the eq on the ipad is very useable, but I have seen other ways of doing it grabing the response drawing, that would be the bomb.
For now I'm glad I have that feature enabled.

+1 for any of the behringer folks reading. The visuals of the eq on the iPad app do not match that of the console. Touch and grab points for eq would be amazing.

Also, please: access to user defined buttons and comp/gate threshold.

 

[Chris Wadden]

Re: Protected Scenes

If anyone manages to do both those things, take away their desk licence, chances are they are causing trouble elsewhere by playing with things they shouldn't.

I was thinking the exact same thing. At the store I work at, I have our "live room" preset saved to slots 70, 80, 90, 99. Then saved to slots 1-5 which is where the board is usually running in. If a customer or any employee screws it up there's a bunch of other places I can pull the scene from.

Or using the USB stick that only the manger has. Not a bad way either.

 

[Mick Berg]

Re: Protected Scenes

Until you can lock out the console settings in some meaningful fashion, I'd skip using the desk to play crossover. I won't go into why (again) this is a shitty idea to start with, but suffice it to say that if you can't stop the maintenance crew from hosing your mix settings, what would be the result of changed SYSTEM settings? I see a bad moon rising, I see trouble on the way....

Tim "getting his Nomex® suit on" Mc

H'mmm, you're right.........hadn't thought of that!

As a workaround in the mean time would be to use an usb-dongle with write protection and keep your read-only scenes there. Then you can teach the soundguy(s) how to load scenes from it....

Errr, Robert, I don't think you understand........................:lol:

I think maybe Chris Wadden's idea of having the default scene saved in many slots at the top end say from 90 to 100 might be good enough.
Then I could set one of the assignable buttons to recall scene 100, say. Then there would be just that button and the confirmation message..


Of course, the assignable button is part of the scene and would have to be programmed in............ But I'm optimistic, I think it could work. Until the priveleges are added, if ever.


Thanks everyone,
Mick Berg.

 

[Paul Mirtschin]

Re: Protected Scenes

Or using the USB stick that only the manger has. Not a bad way either.

Here's an idea for Uli and the Behringer guys - Add in the ability to load a custom "boot scene" from a USB key.

Put the USB key into the slot before booting, and as it boots, the boot-loader looks to the key, sees the custom boot scene, and loads that instead of the "last saved scene" it does now.

It's the same idea as computers have with alternate boot sources, and since the X32 appears to run on a custom Linux core, should be very easy to implement.

Then all that needs doing, is you set up how you want the desk to boot, and save that as your custom boot scene, and store it on a bunch of keys. You could even have separate keys for different users/days with the common settings needed i.e. Wednesday night is a 4-mic, 3-DI live setup, so that boot scene is stored on the key marked "Wednesday", Saturday is the full live setup, with matrix mixes sending to WebCast, that's on the "Saturday" key.

I'm already doing similar to this, the "bootable scene" just makes things a bit quicker.

 

[Per Søvik]

Re: Protected Scenes

I guess I wouldn't mind too much if a "scenes" tab was added to the library screen, and maybe if Scene 1 happened to be named named "boot", the console would load it on boot-up and reset, otherwise not???????

 

[John Chiara]

Re: X32 Discussion

It would be great if the cassette in the recording window would show tape left in relation to remaining disc space.

 

[Per Søvik]

Re: X32 Discussion

It would be great if the cassette in the recording window would show tape left in relation to remaining disc space.

I would prefer if they ditched the nostalgia alltogether and gave us a good sized display with all the relevant information.
I wouldn't mind a two speed rew/ff and/or a jog/shuttle function.

 

[Kevin Wright]

HPF and LPF Crossover Curves

I've been playing around (e.g., A/B tests) with the newly added HPF and LPF crossover curves in the Matrix level. The new features have wonderfully cryptic names like BU6, BS12 and LR24. I figured out that 6, 12, 18 and 24 refer to db/octave slopes corresponding to 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th order slopes. And the initials seem to refer to different algorithm names (Bessel, Linkwitz-Riley, Butterworth).

There was a detailed discussion on crossovers a while back but most of it went over my head. A lot of the literature I found online talks about analog crossovers. I am hoping someone can give me simple advice to help me choose an optimal setting for an onboard crossover (in my case, for splitting the signal for sub-woofers). What are the pros and cons of the different curves in a digital setting? And are their issues like polarity that need to be compensated for?

Some may object vehemently to using the crossover on-board the X32. To appease the purists, I still plan to use my stereo two-way stage-based crossover for regular shows but for small venues, I am looking for ways to lighten the gear and lower the complexity of setup.

Thanks.

 

[Richard Pyne]

Re: Protected Scenes

Can any one of you geniuses out there suggest a way that I can have a default scene, that can't be overwritten except my me, that the maintenance crew can recall with just one button press (or two at the most), if they screw up the settings?

Just a thought, how about a USB thumb drive with a mechanical write protect? They aren't as easy to find as they used to be, but they do exist. Without a lot of digging I found this one: Amazon.com: Imation USB 2.0 Clip Flash Drive, 4GB (66000105602): Electronics

 

[Dave Korman]

Re: Headphone jacks

Originally Posted by Karl Scherzberg The other day I had a pair of headphones plugged in and they were working fine using the jacks on the end caps. I plugged a second set of headphones into the jack on the other side and when I did that, the volume was significantly reduced in the headphones to about half and I lost the stereo mix and only one side of each headphone had audio coming through.

Has anyone else had this problem or have any recommendations on how to fix this? Perhaps this is just normal?

thanks in advance!

karl

The effect of plugging in two sets of phones will vary depending on the impedance of the phones and the source impedance of the headphone amp. Specifically, plugging in low impedance phones may well result in a reduction of level as significant proportion of the available voltage swing will be dropped across the internal source impedance of the headphone amp.

If the first set you used were say, medium impedance and then you plugged in a second set that are low impedance, you are very likely to notice the effect.

The X32 documentation does not give any specs for the headphone amp; I'll do some tests to determine the characteristics when I get my 'scope etc. out to fix a faulty amp in the near future.

 

[Karl Scherzberg]

Re: Headphone jacks

The effect of plugging in two sets of phones will vary depending on the impedance of the phones and the source impedance of the headphone amp. Specifically, plugging in low impedance phones may well result in a reduction of level as significant proportion of the available voltage swing will be dropped across the internal source impedance of the headphone amp.

If the first set you used were say, medium impedance and then you plugged in a second set that are low impedance, you are very likely to notice the effect.

The X32 documentation does not give any specs for the headphone amp; I'll do some tests to determine the characteristics when I get my 'scope etc. out to fix a faulty amp in the near future.

Good thoughts on this. I was wondering if this could possibly be part of the problem, but I really didn't know. I would be interested in seeing/hearing your results when you get the scope out!

 

[Nick Simon]

Thanks Ryan

I watched the webinar with DCAs, Subgroups, and buses yesterday, and I think I understand a little better now...

 

[Per Søvik]

Re: HPF and LPF Crossover Curves

There was a detailed discussion on crossovers a while back but most of it went over my head. A lot of the literature I found online talks about analog crossovers. I am hoping someone can give me simple advice to help me choose an optimal setting for an onboard crossover (in my case, for splitting the signal for sub-woofers). What are the pros and cons of the different curves in a digital setting? And are their issues like polarity that need to be compensated for?

For me it's BW24 every time. Back in the analog days there were phase issues that dictated that steep Butterworth filters might not be the best, but with digital filters, ability to align with delays etc, etc, the steepest filter wins in a sub-top application. It might be a different story alltogether when getting elements in a box to play nicely together.
A word of caution though, particularly if the tops are not powered and somewhat able to protect themselves: Just in case a scene recall sends full range to the tops, one is better to use the sub level for extra thump than bringing the eq up and thus potentially sending a lot of low frequency material to the tops. If one wants to be extra cautious, assigning the tops to outputs that are not assigned by default and hooking the subs up to output 15 and 16 is likely to leave you quite safe (and awfully dull sounding) in the event of a return to default.

 

[David Clemens]

Theatrical Use

I recently ran a children's version of A Christmas Carol using scene recall via midi.
I used Multiplay audio cue software as the trigger, that's the screen on the left in the photo.
Leaving the console set to not automatically advance cues meant I was always saving to the scene I was in.
XControl up on the right hand monitor with the consoles scene list open.
I ended up using about 70 cues for the show, I could have trimmed that some as some repeated and I could have just recalled a single scene as needed instead of having several.