I’m new to working the sound desk in my church and the new Qu-16, so I’m a complete novice.
I’ve connected a laptop into the ST1 Line Inputjack, to play background music.
All has gone well so far, until someone with sound engineer experience made some changes. Now the audio “jumps” on and off. I thought it was a connection so I changed the cable. No change.
I noticed that it only jumps in the beginning and at the end off songs (the quieter portions).
Has a GATE been added that is cutting out the low sounds?
It sounds like the channel has been “gated” go to the channel processing menu for that channel and turn off the gate if it is on.
Not sure I would call that person a “sound engineer”
Maybe they gated the because of some background noise on the channel when music was not playing (somewhat common if the source is a computer). If that was the case the real fix would be using some form of isolation between the music source and the mixer, Di box or some from of transformer isolation.
Maybe best to look around and see what else the did!!!
If you find gates applied to the vocal mics turn them off.
Gates are rarely a “set it and forget it” type of processing element. You will likely need to adjust the threshold depending on the audio being played through the computer.
As you have noted, if the threshold is turned up too far, it can easily cut off audio that is desired. If you set it too low, it will open “prematurely” and let undesired audio in
(Compressors are also not a “set it and forget it” processing element).
As was mentioned gating is not a set and forget type of thing. They work best on input sources with a more consistent input level range, drums for instance.
I had mentioned if you find gates applied on the vocal channels to turn them off, chasing gate thresholds and vocal levels is almost always a losing battle.