No sound at all from outputs on the unit

Qu Qu Troubleshooting
1

Hi, I must have done something wrong, but can’t figure it out and wonder if someone could help me. I noticed today that all my physical outputs on Qu-Pac are silent despite mixer showing that it is sending signal to them. All physical outputs on the mixer (from 1 to 10 as well as L/R) don’t pass any sound to in-ear system and speakers. I can’t hear anything in headphones when selecting main mix PAFL. However I can hear everything well if I patch outputs to AB168 stage box and connect speakers to stage box. But even after disconnecting stage box and rebooting Qu-Pac - still no sound from any physical output. I suspect I have routing messed up somehow and signal is routed to stage box only and not to physical output on qu-pac, but I don’t recall changing any settings since a few months.

Could anyone offer some advice? What should I check?

–
piotr

2

The XLR analog outputs on the QU mixer surfaces and the QU Pac are fixed outputs and can not be changed in the IO set up.
The only outputs that can be “routed” are the AES out and the ALT out.

Have you tried sending something to the ALT out and testing that output?

To double check, say you have signal sent to mix 1, you have nothing at the QU Pac mix output, but on the stage box output that has mix one routed to it you have signal doing nothing more than taking the cable that was plugged into the QU pac and plugging it into the stage box.

What firmware are you running?
Maybe try a hard reset and or a firmware reload.

3

Thank you Mike. Alt Out is patched as L/R and is silent as well. Looks like all outputs are dead on the unit and only stage box works. I’m using firmware v1.95. I’ll try reloading firmware - at this point I guess I won’t hurt.

4

I’ve no idea how to reload firmware, but I reset mixed to its initial settings and still all I hear is silence. Fortunately it is still under warranty.

5
I’ve no idea how to reload firmware, but I reset mixed to its initial settings and still all I hear is silence. Fortunately it is still under warranty.

Reloading the firmware is the same as doing a firmware update or maybe your mixer out of the box was already at 1.95!

Do you have a USB stick formatted to the QU?
You can download the firmware on the Qu section of the A&H website.

The load firm menu is in the set menu under the control tab.

6

Reloading of firmware didn’t help. I checked mic inputs out of curiosity and they seem to be bad as well. When mic is plugged into stage box signal is strong and normal, when plugged into Qu-Pac even when cranked up gain to max value I barely get -20dB of signal. I contacted the dealer - we’ll see what they can do - at this point I’m pretty sure it is a hardware failure (played a gig in February with it, before madness started, and it was fine).

7

I am curious about what folks have been doing with these apparently bricked units and what companies (Allen & Heath and others) are doing. Those of us have been around nearly forever still have A&E analog mixers and otter equipment that is still working fine decades later. I’ve been fortunate in not having had any problems with my QU-PAC and QU-16, and hope it stays that way, but generally can we expect these things on average to last how long? Is it a quality issues? Are these units significantly more vulnerable to being damaged, either simply because the shear number of internal components and connections could fail, and/or because of heating and cooling, and thus more vulnerability at the time of packing and moving these mixers (which are really racks of equipment in a small box). Given that there are figuratively hundreds of components in these systems, always “connected”, is it simply unrealistic to think that something in that chain isn’t eventually going to break. In the past, we’d be frustrated when a single piece of equipment failed but would simply leave it out and replace a compressor or eq, but in these a single part of the system failing seems to often render the entire system dead. Perhaps these companies need to create diagnostic abilities that we can use easily to check the systems and can quickly give us an answer about what if anything is broken. That should not be that hard. And the systems should probably run such a check either on startup, or at least on demand.

8

@DancingBrook

How many bricked units? You seem to think yours is bricked. Do you know of others?
People brick cell phones trying to unlock them. First I heard of it in this Qu context.

I do think you would be well served to learn more about digital and modern electronics.
Analog was nice. Digital is better.

9

A single failure doesn’t necessarily mean that quality control was bad. I guess in all production there will always be small percentage of units with flaws. But you’re right - flaws in digital realm usually are more severe, because typically the whole unit is unusable when they happen.

My unit is definitely far from bricked. Most likely a single component failed which they might be able to replace and it will be all good again. It is a great mixer, served me for almost two years, pretty much everyday.

10

Crimminy. Don’t be so darn defensive.

There have been numerous mentions here of folks not being able to get the mixers to work as they need them to work. Sometimes the problem is solved. Sometimes the poster just disappears. Bricked for me means unusable as needed L, when needed and as intended. If you have to add a stage box to QU-Pac to get any outs, I’d call that bricked. You don’t have to agree, but I sure as heck don’t want to have to troubleshoot such problems right before a sound check.

And I’m not commenting (or assuming) a single failure; I’m sure there are more. My comment is about the nature of how much can be lost with these mixers, when there is trouble. Without the stage box (many have no need) ant’s QU-PAC would be useless.

My comment has to do with the durability of these digital mixers in general. Certainly two years is not all I would expect from a mixer unless perhaps it was a rental unit bounced around day after day, and then I wouldn’t expect anything.

I haven’t had any trouble but given the nature of these, I won’t be surprised if I do. I have a 20 year old A&H analog that has never had a problem. So just wondering…

11

@DancingBrook

Bricked has a fairly wide used definition.
As it DEAD in the water, unable to do anything.
Usually from trying to do things with a cellphone that they were told not to try to do.

Lots of people have problems using complex devices. Some try to use them for things they are not meant to do.
AH gets a lot of those types in the forum as they are volounteers helping with audio, not full time professionals with a decade of experience.

Lots of people have problem with tablets and other ancillary gear because of their design limitations and then blame AH mixers for not doing what they need.

Some people just dont/wont read the manual and expect others to spoon feed them.
To be fair, AH manuals are less than exemplary for quality but they do have the basics albeit at times terse.

You say that you can be sure there are more failures yet unable to cite any.

Of course something can be lost when any device fails. Cars fail all the time. Fix them and move on.

We all expect to have some electronics fail early. Perfection is not possible.
Often the warranty covers it. Other times I have to pay to have it fixed.
My Chevy had problems several years after I bought it, I paid to fix it.
It had many other problems that I just ignored as something I could live without paying to fix.
My Samsung TV had problems at 51 weeks into a one year warranty.
They fixed it. Free. It is still working fine now at 7 years and I expect it to last until it is more than obsolete.

I am still running a PC with win98SE. Works fine. And it is digital. Ditto for an XPPro.
And Both are better than my win8 and win10 laptops.
I expect the 98SE and XP to last a lot longer but am prepared for the day they fail by having backups.
I would still have the win95 but the design made it not worth fixing when the battery died.

Not every mixer is designed to do everything that some person might want.
But if you pick the right AH mixer it will serve you well for a long time, barring that rare random fail, or being abused.

As I said you need to learn something about modern electronics and not expect what worked in the 60s to be the norm.
Digital is SO much better than analog and does so much more, faster better cheaper easier, that your innuendo about bricks get no sympathy from me.

If you have a problem then start your own thread and ask about it.
That is what ant did. He did not start blaming AH for bricking his device like you assUMEd.

12

wow, I didn’t want this malfunction to start a civil war :wink:

@volounteer, I didn’t read @dancingbrook’s post as an attack on anything. In fact, I share his curiosity about longevity of digital gear (although all my gear is digital because it is just so much more convenient and space efficient), however since this is relatively new branch of tech it is probably too early to tell. It is a valid concern because digital gear relies on components which might not be manufactured anymore, may rely on firmware from third parties, which might no longer be maintained, and relies on other products (iPad, host os) which have their own lifetime etc. (Look at what is happening with Access Virus right now - the most capable digital synthesizer out there, which doesn’t work with latest macOS - and no, staying with old hardware / OS is not something I’d recommend unless you’re completely disconnected from the internet - which is not practical for most of us). So yes, digital is great but has its issues as well - like anything else - and it is OK to ask questions/raise concerns about it - and it is not an attack.

You’re right that reliability of gear is different issue than risk management, where the latter is typically dealt with by means of redundancy (which I have to address by the way - it seems).

anyway, have a great rest of your Sunday

13

Yeah, lighten up. Have a good day.

14

@ant

he said a lot of qupacs were BRICKED as I read his message
then implied a lot of things that were bad about AH and digital

15

The only thing that ever bricked on my Qu-Pac was between my own ears. Just me though.

16

Just to close the loop: I sent my qu-pac to repair center and it is fixed now. Due to COVID-19 situation it took almost month to have it fixed. Now it’s time to think about backup unit.

17

I had the same problem with my Qu-pac. A hard reset fixed it.

18

I just had a similar problem with a QU-PAC. It was intermittent and crackly just like a bad connection, but it was all outputs simultaneously. Only the AES3 was solid. After warming up a bit it would work. In troubleshooting I found a good whack would fix it. So I opened it up and sprayed/wiped all the ribbon and pin connectors with Deoxit. It’s now working fine, but of course the process of deracking and disassembling it could also have done that. We shall see how it lasts.

Obviously the bad connection had to be in the digital domain to affect all channels at once. The interesting thing to me was that a digital bad connection sounds a lot like an analog one.

Dale

19

I have one of the original Qu-Pacs and Qu-16s purchased shortly after their original release dates, and both are still going strong. I also have GLDs which are even older, and also still working perfectly. A&H has always been known for making a solid product. :smiley:

20

Like @Scott, I purchased my QU-16 in January 2014 and it has been faultless, same goes for the QU-SB which is my goto setup now and has been for a few years.