At last night’s gig a strange thing happened - during the middle of a song the CQ18T suddenly power cycled itself and we lost sound for about 20 seconds. And of course when it came back on some of the settings I had dialed in were reset, including the FBA, so we got a quick burst of feedback. I had to quickly mute everything, turn down the mains, then unmute and finish out the set at which point I set up the FBA again and all was good for the rest of the night.
I think what happened was a brief power issue probably coming from the circuit it was using. Got me thinking about getting a cheap 260W UPS for just the mixer to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
The specs I’ve found say the CQ18T draws a maximum of 35W so I’m figuring that a 260W UPS with only the mixer plugged into it should be fine.
But before I do that I want to make sure it shouldn’t be a problem. Has anyone here done this? Can the mixer run off a small UPS without issues?
Hello.
As I have not try this for real, I will answer in a theoretical way, even if I am 100% sure of my answer.
So, no pb in theory, the mixer will consume the power it’s needed, not more.
Regardless of whether you’re considering a UPS that provides AC mains power or 12V, please note that the user guide states the “Max Power Consumption” is 45W.
I suggest you to install a simple powerbank, with in and out connexions.
For a micro shutwown, you need a tini bank, of course if shutdown is longer, chose about 5 Ah it would be enough.
I connect my Zoom FN8 Pro AND the CQ18T behind my bank.
Sometime, when music shutdown in my music room, I have time to sutdown quitely.
Exist different configurations, you also can connect both with an “Y” câable
don’t use a “cheap” UPS. As soon as they switch over to battery power, they often deliver a terribly distorted/edgy sine wave because of a badly constructed inverter…
The smaller APC “SI” series aren’t that cheap, but they’ll at least give you clean power in case of an outage…
I’m not really concerned about an edgy sine wave. If the power goes completely out, the mains and monitors and instrument amps will also go down. I just want a way to prevent what happened at the last gig. I’m still not even sure if it was a power issue or a mixer issue. I really hope it wasn’t the mixer. If it was a power issue, the power fluctuation was so brief that it didn’t affect anything else, just the mixer. So if this happens again, at most it would be maybe a half second glitch.
It’s strange though because other than the occasional tripped breaker I’ve never experienced this at any gig. At one gig the power was so bad that when the kick drum would hit, the light strings they had hanging over the stage would dim. It looked like a strobe light show. And that didn’t affect the mixer.
Anyway, I already got the UPS so I’ll give it a try and hope for the best. If it turns out to be problematic and introduces noise or anything like that I’ll use it for something at home and just buy a better one for the mixer.
That’s the exact same one I bought. I’ll be using it tonight for the first time but I tested it at home and didn’t run into any issues. I also unplugged it from the outlet to see if running on battery caused any unwanted noise but it seemed to work fine.
I’m not sure if the CQ18T is just very sensitive to power fluctuations or if it malfunctioned.
