GLD 80 - Failed to connect to DSP board error.

GLD GLD Troubleshooting
1

So right now the console is working just fine… however i’ve had this error a week ago on a gig and it almost gave me a hart attack so i wanted to see if someone can shed some light on the situation.

The gig was under a tent and it was very hot, the board wasn’t in direct sunlight but the air temperature has been very high.
I did a soundcheck, everything went fine. Then we had a power dropout (sudden cold shutdown).

I swiched to another electricity source and finished the soundcheck.

So the mixer is on a table, has been working fine for a couple of hours, it’s connected to the AR2412 stagebox with the expander. And it’s connected to my ipad with mixing station on it.

I go to the van to change my clothes, i come back and i see the ipad dissconected.
On the mixer screen there is an error message saying: “Failed to connect to DSP board”. As much as i remember there was also an option on the touchscreen to reboot the console. I tried that and the console booted back into the exact same error!

After that, i muted the PA and shut off monitors, i cold rebooted the console. It booted back up again normally and worked just fine during the gig (that was the next 8 hours). No problems at all.

A week later, i opened it up, cleaned eveything inside with an air compressor, i changed the CMOS battery just in case… and then i took a good look at all the flat and USB cables inside the console. Everything was looking perfectly fine.

I then tried unplugging the USB cables from the motherboard on the PC inside of the console, to try and replicate the error. But i wasn’t able to do it… the console would loose some functionality when i unplugged something, but kept working with no errors.

So i reseated all the usb cables back, cleaned the connectors with a bit of contact-spray. Put some new zip-laces to keep them in place and re-assembled the console.

So i basically wansn’t able to reproduce this error in any way. I also never saw it before in the lifetime of this console.

Could anyone shed some light on this? Could it be the heat in the tent or the power dropout?

The firmware is 1.62, there was no usb sticks plugged into the console at the time this happened.

2

Hi,

last weekend I experienced the same issue on a GLD 112, right in the middle of a gig. There’s been a power outage about 10 mins before the issue occurred. As the console itself was running on UPS power and behind a Furman power controller, it just kept working, and everything looked just fine when power came back.

But then all of a sudden this message showed up and the console was frozen altogether (incl. the channel led meters, which just showed the last signal level right at when it froze; very weird). It continued working, but I couldn’t make any changes whatsoever. I kindly asked the band to finish the song, then pause and give me the opportunity to reboot the console (and really hoped it’ll come back up again). I initially confirmed the request to reboot, but it came back up showing the exact some error). I then shut it off and back on (power-cycle) again, and it eventually come back up alright. It continued working just fine for the rest of the day (couple of hours).

The only thing I can think of is that it’s related to the stageboxes (AR2412 and AR84 in this case) which were affected by the power outage. I’m curious to understand what has caused this behaviour, never seen this before throughout the years. Lesson learned: next time I’ll give the console a power-cycle following a power-outage, before moving on with the gig. :wink:

3

Your description fits my experience 10/10 — it matches exactly what’s happened to me, down to the details.

For context, this has happened to me maybe five times over the past two years, always during soundchecks (so I’ve been lucky). I still haven’t figured out the exact cause.

Just last week, I did an 8-band festival plus two other gigs back-to-back — no issues whatsoever. The console ran for 12 hours straight, under the hot sun, without a single problem.

The last time this freeze happened, I was setting up the PA and had extra time, so I used the opportunity to observe what really happens. I left the console running and noticed that while the controls were completely frozen, audio continued to pass for about 10 minutes. After that, audio stopped entirely and I had to do a full cold restart. As you mentioned, doing a soft shutdown just leads to it booting back into the same error state.

From what we’ve seen, the best workaround so far is to do a cold restart as soon as possible. After that, the console usually runs just fine for the rest of the gig.

We also confirmed that this issue happens on both firmware versions 1.61 and 1.62, and we both use the same AR stageboxes. In my case, there was never a power outage, but I have sometimes disconnected and reconnected the stageboxes shortly before the issue occurred. So, there’s a possibility the stageboxes are related?

One more question: when this happened to you, did you have Mixing Station connected to the board? If so, which router were you using?

I recently ordered the new QU-5, which I like a lot — but I’m still really frustrated by this issue. The GLD is such a solid and powerful console for its age… I’d honestly never consider selling it.

4

No, there was no remote app connected at this point (although the console was connected to a router/access point).

5

So now we also know it"s and internal console problem not caused by an external device. (Unless the router can cause this. You using tpLink maybe or not? ).

I also saw another recent post here on the forum just now.
Exactly the same error with the same messages. Look at the third error row related to the USB manager.

I saw this every time the console crashed and i believe that is what causes the error.

I wish we could somehow reach someone from allen & heath to release a bugfix firmware update for this. These consoles are still around and they work well.