Hi,
Just bought our New Qu7 for church, a first of switching to Digital Mixer from Analog seems to be having lots of issues with Feedback and howling from certain Microphones. Is there any Tutorial or Guide on how to setup Feebback assistant on certain input channels.
Thank you
Niks
Before you rely on the feedback assistant you need to be sure the gain structure is correct and the system is properly set up and eq’d taking care of the obvious ringing frequencies and over all system voicing.
It may be worth bringing in someone to go through the system, set it up and do some training on the mixer…..finding that right person can be tricky!
To be honest I’ve never used any feedback type of eliminator but I heard the after effects of them being over used and notching away way too many frequency bands.
I have a Qu-5, so this should apply. I use the mixer at our Church, which has an active reverb in our untreated Sanctuary. Add in a novice assistant sound engineer, this equals we have to rely on the feedback assistant for our FOH mix.
My use of the feedback assistant is still a work in progress, but we’re getting decent results, so no major complaints.
OK, now what I’ve done up to this point, common setup of mics to inputs, setting various aux mixes and so on. I took pains to identify which mics would be worse for feedback and paid more attention to those channels.
Test: LR selected and unmuted, try various combo of input fader vs LR Master fader output, trying to find feedback threshold and which input to output combo allows highest total output before feedback. Having found a preferred combo, go forward to FBA.
If you have bad feedback, you might need to edit amp gain as I did. I turned mine back and still get good output. Mine was a replacement install of Qu-5 mixer from another mixer, so all settings were up for edit.
First thing I think you may want to experiment with is at the beginning, the input gain. I do like the suggested per input PAFL to get output to show in the meter next to the screen. Per input channel, set gain to hit into the lightly lighting yellow which would be about analog -18 dB. I allow it slightly hotter than this, which means the first yellow is not quite solid on my loud speaking tests. Once you get the input gain where you’d like, go to next mic, repeating until all gains set as needed.
Now with LR selected, go to your Processing page, far left button under screen. Select the FBA/GEQ tab near the top left on the touchscreen to access the FBA control, flagged yellow in attached image. First click Detection On button, pink on the FBA, in attached image it’s flagged in red. Select your choice of fixed or live filters.
Attached image for reference, I’m editing the width of filter and cut to shape how much feedback affects audio. This is under the Adjust tab on lower left side of FBA, flagged as green in my image. Width and Cut flagged blue.
Click width and your lower right edit encoder with yellow light can control the edit for these. Ditto for cut.
I follow-up with broad mid cuts, and high and low shelves in LR PEQ because my room feedback is pretty bad otherwise. My FOH is just mainly sound reinforcement of spoken and vocals. Still waiting on room treatment to remedy better than just FBA, but this is where we’re at now, so like a good sound engineer, suck it up and deal with it.
Bonus: I start my Qu-5 then Go with a Scene that’s my preconfigured Start setup, then immediately go into LR select, access FBA and click Detection On. I believe I have built a FBA preset accessible in my library that I’ll load after start-up.
