First time poster... be nice to me...
I am the sound engineer for a small community theatre group which operates at two different theatres. In one, we use the house system, which is based on a fairly recent Mackie 24-channel analog board.
For the other, we use our own original Yamaha 01V feeding the house Meyer Sound powered speakers, three across the front, from main L and R, and from a Bus mix routed to one of the Omni outs. I use other Bus and Aux mixes to the other Omni outs to drive stage and band monitors, and very recently for recording to a Zoom H4n digital recorder (XLR in as well as on-board stereo condenser mics).
The problem I have is excess digital noise on the Omni outputs. I have often noticed noise on the stage monitors but put it down to dodgy house cabling or some other analog problem. However, this past time I ran my own known-good cables and the noise was still there.
Worse, when I tried to run a mono wireless-mic-only mix to the Zoom in order to get a third clean vocals channel to mix into the on-board stereo, the recording as unusably noisy, even though the level coming out of the 01V seemed to be plenty hot enough. This mix was to "Bus 1" internally, which I'm guessing meant that it got the L part of each mono wireless channel (all of which were panned centre so that they came out of Main L & R).
I messed around with the routing and found that the noise was present even if all the input channels were muted (which I'm assuming is a digital mute), but went away if I de-routed the channels from the Bus in question.
The Main L & R outputs, on the other hand, are dead quiet.
Does anyone have any experience with 01Vs behaving like this? I'm familiar with digital audio processing and the need to keep levels up to avoid quantisation problems, and the limitations of older DACs, but the noise I'm hearing is at a much higher floor than I'd expect. I have no idea what the internal architecture of the 01V is, but surely digital is digital and there's no real way for anything to go wrong with the summing mechanism such that some parts would be noisier than others, and my original assumption was the the Omni outs were dying in an analog manner (or just that they had crappy DACs) but the fact that the noise goes away when I de-route channels from the Bus seems to go against this.
I completely love the mixer in every other way (it's 15 years old and has needed nothing more than one replacement fader motor a few years ago) so I'm hesitant to scrap it in favour of something newer and (maybe) quieter.
I have a Behringer ADA8000 box which can hook up with ADAT to get extra/alternative/quieter outputs, but that would be a P.I.T.A. for general use.
Thoughts? I'll keep playing with it, but any input is welcome...
Simon Eves
Stapleton Theatre Company
San Anselmo, CA
I am the sound engineer for a small community theatre group which operates at two different theatres. In one, we use the house system, which is based on a fairly recent Mackie 24-channel analog board.
For the other, we use our own original Yamaha 01V feeding the house Meyer Sound powered speakers, three across the front, from main L and R, and from a Bus mix routed to one of the Omni outs. I use other Bus and Aux mixes to the other Omni outs to drive stage and band monitors, and very recently for recording to a Zoom H4n digital recorder (XLR in as well as on-board stereo condenser mics).
The problem I have is excess digital noise on the Omni outputs. I have often noticed noise on the stage monitors but put it down to dodgy house cabling or some other analog problem. However, this past time I ran my own known-good cables and the noise was still there.
Worse, when I tried to run a mono wireless-mic-only mix to the Zoom in order to get a third clean vocals channel to mix into the on-board stereo, the recording as unusably noisy, even though the level coming out of the 01V seemed to be plenty hot enough. This mix was to "Bus 1" internally, which I'm guessing meant that it got the L part of each mono wireless channel (all of which were panned centre so that they came out of Main L & R).
I messed around with the routing and found that the noise was present even if all the input channels were muted (which I'm assuming is a digital mute), but went away if I de-routed the channels from the Bus in question.
The Main L & R outputs, on the other hand, are dead quiet.
Does anyone have any experience with 01Vs behaving like this? I'm familiar with digital audio processing and the need to keep levels up to avoid quantisation problems, and the limitations of older DACs, but the noise I'm hearing is at a much higher floor than I'd expect. I have no idea what the internal architecture of the 01V is, but surely digital is digital and there's no real way for anything to go wrong with the summing mechanism such that some parts would be noisier than others, and my original assumption was the the Omni outs were dying in an analog manner (or just that they had crappy DACs) but the fact that the noise goes away when I de-route channels from the Bus seems to go against this.
I completely love the mixer in every other way (it's 15 years old and has needed nothing more than one replacement fader motor a few years ago) so I'm hesitant to scrap it in favour of something newer and (maybe) quieter.
I have a Behringer ADA8000 box which can hook up with ADAT to get extra/alternative/quieter outputs, but that would be a P.I.T.A. for general use.
Thoughts? I'll keep playing with it, but any input is welcome...
Simon Eves
Stapleton Theatre Company
San Anselmo, CA