Odd panning issue, can you dump a scene file and view it?

Qu Qu Troubleshooting
1

I’m using Mix 5/6, 7/8, 9/10 on my Qu-24 for stereo headphone mixes; I’m pairing each to a Behringer Powerplay P1 headphone amp for all three players.

I’ve configured Mix Sends to unity (post-fader) for Kick (1), Snare (2), bass DI (12), guitar (13/14), to each respective Mix. The rest of the channels are muted; none of the unmuted channels are being routed to LR.

I’ve done some panning to represent the musician’s physical position in the room: for example, the guitarist has the bass panned hard right and his guitar slightly left; drummer has bass left, guitar right 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock respectively.

To test, I’ve been routing a pre-recorded song to each of the individual channels on the Qu; I’ve set the faders in the DAW so that Reaper’s meters are all around -18dBFS.

Mix 7/8, 9/10 sound fine; my panning is correct, life is good.

However, Mix 5/6, for the bass player, has some wonky panning going on: the kick is placed in the left side along with bass DI, and really faint guitar on the right side, like there’s some weird phase cancellation going on. When I toggle the Mono button on the P1, it sounds correct, level-wise, but obviously it’s being summed to mono at this point.

I’ve swapped cables, headphones, P1 units, etc. so it’s definitely Mix 5/6 and how it’s configured, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why it sounds weird.

I’ve saved it as a scene: is is possible to copy a scene to a USB key and then open/edit it, i.e. is it in a human-readable format?

Anywhere else I should look?

2

Are you sure you have the same channel source set for the three mixes ? (Post preamp)

Giga

3

I believe so, but I will double check today.

4

Went through everything, upgraded firmware to 1.95; spent a good hour and can’t figure it out. I’m almost considering that something’s failed physically.

I tried muting everything but the bass DI on channel 12 and experienced the following phenomenon:

With the pan pot set to 0, I can hear the bass DI 100% in the right channel at a level that seems reasonable given the gain (-18dBFS in DAW, USB gain set to 0 on Qu-channel; fader at unity).

If I pan the channel strip 100% left, it’s extremely faint, in the left channel. Anything but panning 100% left in the channel strip, and the bass DI is heard in the right speaker of the headphones, 100% volume.

I’ve had cans with a crapped out cable before, and if say the left side is toast, then you’ll gradually hear an increase as you pan from 100% hard left to center to hard right. This is like 0 to 100% immediately outside hard left 100%, like 99% and you hear the bass full volume in the right side.

I’ve tried with any mono channel: kick, snare, etc. and it’s all the same.

And to repeat, I’ve swapped cables, swapped cans, swapped headphone amps and to no avail.

I gave up and used the Group 3/4 stereo channel for now, which works as expected.

If anyone has a Qu-24, I’ve downloaded the scene and can upload it if anyone wants to load it up and have a gander, see if I’m overlooking something.

5

Strange… Have you tried a hard reset ?

Giga

6

No. I tried loading an old scene to no avail.

Maybe I’ll give that a go.

7

Make sure you don’t have channels 11 & 12 linked.

8

Ah, I’ll have to check that out. I don’t see why I would as 5/6 was used for a headphone mix previously without issue, but that was a year ago, so fat fingers may have prevailed since then.

Another phenomenon is that routing Channel 3 Out vs. selecting Channel 3/4 Out in Reaper is significantly quieter, when feeding the snare track back to the Qu-24 via USB.

I don’t know if that’s a Reaper thing, but I couldn’t see anything in particular that would be different between the mono vs. stereo option, unless some weird summing is going on, but channel 4 is another mono track (Leslie/organ).