Dropped Lead Mic Signal and Pulsing Sub M20d

[bassoctopus]

Hello,

 

I own a very nice Line 6 rig for my live sound business Gorilla HQ. It consists at the moment of -

1 x L3T

1 x L3M

1 x L3S

 

for FOH

 

And for Stage monitor mix

 

1 x L2M

1 x L2T

 

The desk is an M20d with firmware v1.20

 

I've been using the gear for the last 6 months without problems and it sounds amazing.

 

So, I was doing a high class gig with a small band on Saturday night, using 12 standard inputs and 2 of the Line in inputs. Levels were going sitting around the 0.00 mark on the mixer, very occasionally peaking into the yellow area. Running the main outs at around +2db to acheive this. The setup was L6link - L3 - L2 - L2 - L3 - L3S. The desk was also being controlled by two ipads - one monitor engineer, one FOH, and an SD recording was taking place.

 

Around 80 minutes into the gig the sub started dropping in and out of the mix. Now this could have been a power issue, I never got the chance to investigate fully (more of which later), but the band were complaining that it happened for around 5 minutes before the next issue...

 

Which was that we lost the lead mic out of any of the speakers. No monitors, no tops but there was still a signal coming into the desk, and the channel wasn't muted.

 

All this was very embarassing, but I got away with it because about 2 minutes after this happened, the over zealous caretaker of the venue decided it was time for the party to stop and pulled the power on the whole gig - so he got blamed for all the issues.

 

Now, when the power came back up the lead vox mic was working fine.

 

This kind of software glitch terrifies me, because there is nothing you can do about it, save reboot the mixer - which is exactly what you don't want when you're charging a band for sound.

 

Can anyone advise on my best way to now test my system before the weekend when I have more gigs.

 

Cheers

 

Neil

Gorilla HQ

[bassoctopus]

Just as a piece of extra info on this, I spoke to the band who took the SD card of the recording of this night. I can confirm the following.

 

1. The Lead microphone which dropped out also dropped out from the SD recording as well as FOH/Monitors. This takes out the possibility that it could have been muted but not shown the graphic on the ipad.

 

2. The second set the band played, which is the set where we had the problems, the recording which we started up is timestamped as 1 jan 1980 00:00. The first set recording was the correct date and time.

 

3. Checked Firmware levels on all the speakers and they are all v1.05

 

I'd be interested to know if the mixer keeps any internal logs of what is going on, and whether it is possible to download and interrogate them?

[dboomer]

I would check the connection from the last speaker to the sub.

[bassoctopus]

Hi, thanks for the response.

 

A couple of things on this. When I tested the sub dropping out of the loop (L6 link or power) at home today, it makes the mixer re-setup all the monitors and drops the audio for a millisecond. I didn't notice this happening at all - of course it could have been with a live band that the acoustic noise of the band covered this, but I didn't notice it happening on the vox, and I think I would have.

 

Also, the dropping of the lead mic both from the speakers and to the recording is a bit of an odd one. What's your opinion on this?

[dboomer]

It is normal that if any speaker in the L6 link drops that all the speakers in the system re-enumerate.

 

Sounds like the mic problem is in the mic, the cable or the input channel.  Have you tried a different input channel?