Our church has a GLD 80. This past Sunday the complete left fader bank died on me. I re-booted the console a number of times with no change, but I was able to reconfigure a bit and use the right bank and an ipad to get through the service. Of course, when I brought it home to troubleshoot it worked perfectly. Looking at the way the fader bank modules are wired makes it a bit surprising that the left one would die but the right one would continue to work. The USB from the main board goes to the left bank and then there is a ribbon cable from the left to the right. If the power plug for the left bank module is unplugged the right bank doesn’t work either. Any ideas on what the issue may be?
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I would first check your shielded cat5e. Check your connection logs too.
You mean the cat5 connecting to the AR2412? I can check it, but not really sure how that would make sense. Audio back and forth was still working perfectly fine, just the one fader bank stopped functioning.
In the moment I didn’t think to look at the connection logs, and unless I’m missing something it appears they reset every time the console is shut down and turned back on. Unfortunately, that doesn’t allow me to get any ideas that way seeing as it is all working now.
We just saw something similar with our GLD-112, but it was with the center bank. We contacted a company in Minnepolis (A&H dealer) that does repairs. Basically, the GLDs are known for having bad connections (connectors and ribbon cables). Several times, we tried removing the ribbon connectors, cleaned them with special cleaners, and reconnected. They would work for a short period, then failed AGAIN. The cost of the replacement boards are NOT cheap. The board that we were looking at was over $1,000, and if you replaced it, you might run for a while and have another failure. HOW we solved it, we now have a SQ-7, but are reusing our AR2412 and AR84.
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I have heard of the bad cables/connectors as well, but it still seems strange to me that the second module in the chain was still working fine when the first one was dead.
Those ribbon cables have lots of individual lines. Some of the lines could be reserved for the first board, some for the second board. If there’s a problem with the connector on the “first board” lines, but not the “second board” lines , that would explain what you’re seeing.
I still don’t think the ribbon cable is the issue in this case as it just goes from the left (master) fader module to the right (slave) module and the right one has been working the whole time. The left module is connected to the main board via USB.
I’ve figured out that the left fader module can pass the information through to the right module but still not move it’s own faders if only one set of power pins on the four pin connector is connected. (I’d have to double check if it’s the 5v or the 12v.) It seems it uses one set for the information and the other set to actually move the faders.