me500 Routing - Stereo coming in as mono

ME ME Troubleshooting
1

So I’m having some trouble linking sending stereo channels down to our me500s. Currently the setup runs as follows. cat5 out of the dsnake port of our QU-32, into the first me500 mixer, and then that is daisy chained to another 6 down the line. I have been running most everything in mono except for our keys & drumbus which has run totally fine in stereo. I recently decided I wanted to run an Electric guitar in stereo so I remapped and added some of the groups (an fx group, miscellaneous group) to run in stereo instead of mono. When I did that, I’m now only getting the left side of the stereo channels.
The Channels are as follows

White Mic - Channel 1 on QU channel 1 on me500
Red Mic - Channel 2 on QU channel 2 on me500
Blue Mic - Channel 3 on QU channel 3 on me500
Bass - channel 12 on QU channel 4 on me500
Acoustic Guitar - channel 11 on QU channel 5 on me500
Stereo Electric - channel 13 & 14 on QU channel 6 on me500
Flex (aux) - channel 16 on QU channel 7 on me500
Pad (tracks) - channel 15 on QU channel 8 on me500
Stereo Keys - channels 9 & 10 on QU channel 9 on me500
Stereo Drumbus - group 7&8 on QU channel 10 on me500
Snare - channel 21 on QU channel 11 on me500
Kick - channel 20 on QU channel 12 on me500
Drum Talkback mic - channel 29 on QU channel 13 on me500
misc.(speaker mics, spotify, etc.) - Group 5 & 6 on QU channel 14 on me500
Click - Channel 30 on QU channel 15 on me500
FX (drum verb, vox verb & delay) - Group 3 & 4 on QU channel 15 on me500

2

Hi Zach,

The ME-500 will treat a channel as stereo when:

  • The channel is stereo linked in the Qu mixer, AND
  • Both L and R sides are sent to the ME-500

So for example, you say your Stereo Electric is ch 13-14 on the Qu-32. Assuming these are linked, you have to patch both 13 and 14 to the Monitor port in the I/O screen.
The ME-500 will recognise the stereo link and occupy only one of the 16 keys.
The confusion is sometimes users expect the Monitor patch to map 1:1 to keys on the ME-500. It doesn’t. The Monitor patch will show two ‘sockets’ for each stereo input or group, and thus can often exceed 16 ‘sockets’, but the ME-500 will automatically assign the first 16 mono or stereo channels to its 16 keys.

Hope this makes sense!

3

Hey Nicola,

Thankfully I resolved my issue. I did have the channels linked but was only getting signal down the left channel thus only hearing sound in my left ear. Come to find out that the stereo channels would only work when I mapped the stereo channels in the I/O menu on odd-even numbers. For example stereo channels 13 & 14 mapped on outputs 8 & 9 would not work, but if they are mapped to 9 & 10 they will work. I think having that listed in the me500 manual would help out a lot of people and save a whole lot of time.
Thank you for your response!