Hi there, Just thought I’d write a quick post giving some feedback and letting you guys know a few potential pitfalls and workarounds.
I’ve just set up a fairly complex DLive touring rig, for a medium/large theatre tour in the UK. Yesterday was the first trial tech day.
Running Dlive 1.40, an S3000 surface, DM64, 10 iPads, Dante card, QLab, a microsoft surface 3.
This is for a 7-8 piece experienced rock band. I’ve set up with 64 channels for “Monitors” (on IEMS) and 64 channels for FOH.
I’ve used about 60 inputs, probably about 40 from stage with 20 ish from QLab over Dante (from virtual soundcard)
Was focussing on the IEMs for the first day.
Positives:
What a desk! The configurable groups are awesome!
To keep things simple for the guys I’m pre mixing to a whole bunch of groups, and using scenes to feed the groups with whatever instrument or mic the guy is using at that point. It means that there can be a single fader on the iPad for each person’s instrument and mic, no matter which position on stage, or instrument, they happen to be using for that song.
I can use FX units as inserts even when I haven’t given mix busses to them! I’ve got them running as insert on the IEM aux’s and can run 0dB dry and dial in as much wet as the guys want, without having a messy shared aux for ears reverb.
Negatives:
The OneMix doesn’t work quite as I expected it to! It seems that the Mix layout is stored locally on the iPad? As there were user profiles available for login, I had assumed that the guys could log in to their Mix from any iPad. This is not so. The user profiles are only there to pick up restrictions from the desk. Massive missed opportunity here I think. I now have to have up to 3 iPads on some of the stage locations for the 3 different guys who play that instrument, instead of a quick login to “my mix” on a single iPad.
Had 2-3 hours of huge issues getting the iPads talking consistently with the desk. It was wifi issues mainly, but it highlighted one VERY important BUG:
Using the “OneMix” app. There’s a problem in that, when connection is lost, the app will often LOSE the mix setup!!! and when reconnected, I had to often spend a few minutes rebuilding the channels back into the mix! This is unacceptable during a show!!!
I had been using iPad4 on initially a dLink router, then a tplink router. on both 2.4Ghz then exclusively on 5Ghz. Neither solved the problem, as soon as more than 3-4 iPads were connected, either the next one wouldn’t log in (endless “please wait” on the onemix app) or it would kick one of the other iPads off! The wifi seemed stable, but the app kept losing connection.
After some embarrassment and panic, I used an APPLE airport router and everything suddenly was rock solid with 8 iPads connected - had some lag when connecting number 9 and one drop out (rebuild of mix required!) when I connected number 10.
As we suspect it’s a combination of interference and bandwidth issues, we’ve decided that for the majority of these positions, we’re going to use CAT5e to the iPads (which removes the advantage of portability round the stage) - We hurriedly bought "Apple Lightning to USB3 Camera Adapter"s and a bunch of USB to Ethernet adapters with some lightning extension cables. Amazingly, THESE WORK - Even on iPad4 (from 2012) on the latest iOS 10.2.1 - you can disable wifi and it will appear as an ethernet connection - But you GOTTA have a 2.1Amp power supply feeding into the camera adapter or the ethernet adapter’s power will drop out.
Another issue is with incredibly slow scene recall. I have VERY tightly focussed recall filter - in this case only channel change from out of one group into another with only the relevant channel and groups allowed. This still took about 15-20 seconds to recall! I think it was very quick without the iPads connected though. Need to do some more testing on that, but that is a BAD long time to have your screen locked to “scenes busy” message. Might try setting some more global SAFEs to see if that helps.
There were also occasional interface lags when pressing buttons sometimes 4 seconds or so of pressing “processing” or “routing” before the screen would switch.
Final negative I had was needing to do a lot of channel strip reassignments on the S3000 on the fly to access my FOH channels - I’d populated the desk with all the 64 monitor input channels and the monitor submix groups so had to scatter the FOH channels around where I had some space left and couldn’t fit them all on the 6 layers. (Not so much a problem going fwd as I’m going to be using a computer running Director as the “Monitors” surface) - ALSO now in 1.40, I imagine I will have a play with the DCA Spill function to see if that does what I hope it will for getting quick’n’dirty access to more channel strips.
All in all - very impressed with this system though. Nowhere else do I think could I get this kind of channel count and mix group flexibility at this price point. Dante was rock solid from Qlab and scene control over the A&H TCP midi driver worked great.
But please!
Fix the OneMix app - or even improve it to allow multiple logins on a single iPad (so they can be Position, rather than Person, locked). But definitely don’t make me rebuild a mix strip allocation mid show!!! please?!
AND PLEASE - allow me to scope the Recall Filter to separate out the send ON/OFF from the send LEVEL. This has made a very big crimp on what I can do for my guys using scenes and has led to burning up of many more group mixes than I wanted to. I had to add the group mixes as an ‘abstraction layer’ to allow scene switching of channels in and out of mixes without messing with the guys mix levels. (while we’re at it, make Auto-Store work when recalling a scene from midi or soft-button - seems like a bug to have it only work from the GO button…)
BTW as a side note on this whole system - I also use an 8 mix ME-u/ME-1 system on a different tour. Possibly better than iPads apart from the 40 channel limit needing messy grouping at the desk - I know - still better than all the competition but still not quite there yet for large channel count mixes, AND I can’t scene change the ME-1s from the desk, AND trailing twin XLRs back to my IEM wireless rack is making for some horrible looms messing up the stage! (I’d sacrifice 2 of my 40 ME channels to run a stereo return to the ME-U!)
Any questions, ask away, hopefully my experiences here will open some doors or help avoid some pitfalls.
