Outboard Gear Audio player to use with QSYS

[Morte615]

So what's your go to media player to use with QSC's Q-Sys? I am looking for something that is at least 8 channels, prefer 16 channel but as much as possible I want to keep the wiring simple and want to stay digital.

I know the core has audio playback capability but I'm looking for an outboard system that I can just pop a card in and change what is playing, or send updates through Ethernet. I don't want to use the Core since I am severely limited on the amount of audio it can have, and I want to keep that available for paging.

Would love something along the lines of an Alcorn Mcbride ProTraxx, but don't want to have 16 RCA connectors going to Line In cards. Not only is that moving from digital to analog and back to digital, it's also taking up quite a few card slots in my core, or IO Frame.

So what player would you recommend, and how would you connect it to the system?

Thanks!

 

[themuzicman]

They recently released a Dante card for Q-Sys, if you have the budget for that card, you could go into it via DVSC

 

[MNicolai]

What's the use case? Is this multi-channel surround or effects playback for custom sound designs? Bells that need to chime in the lobby at intermission?

Do you want something fully you control on a laptop with a program like Ableton Live, or do you want it mostly fixed what's loaded into it and you just trigger it somehow?

 

[Morte615]

Mostly it's for standard background audio playback. It doesn't even have to trigger or anything (though that would be nice.) The players will be started once and never turn off, mutes and such will be handled by QSYS. Though we do need the ability to update a single (or pair) channel without affecting the others currently running (think hot swappable {but not really lol})

I am looking for the ability to have 16 discrete channels (or 8 stereo but would prefer 16 discrete) that I can send to different zones depending on the routing inside QSYS. The QSYS side is easy, mostly I am looking to see if there is an easy way to add a player instead of running 16 different cables from the output to inputs (and of course the extra expansion cards needed)

At this point I am not tied into any particular player (though if I have to go with the analog side I will probably go with either the Protraxx or Bin loop from Alcorn Mcbride) and have not purchased the Core yet so I can build it out however I need. But if I have to go with the analog option I will need to add an IO Frame because of the number of expansion cards to get all the features I need, hence overall project cost goes up.

I have been looking at the Cobra Net cards but not sure if they would work between just the 2 devices without needing a full Cobra Net install.

 

[MNicolai]

Cobranet will work with just 2 devices but might as well be an obsolete protocol. If you're investing in the future, you'd want to go Dante. Costs twice as much as the Cobranet card but there are many more products being released today with Dante natively built-in, and Cobranet devices are becoming few and far between.

That said, I have yet to find a good Dante audio player. If you want to go outboard, you very well may have to go Protraxx analog into the Core. If this means adding some cards, that doesn't cost too much money. If this means you need to add an I/O frame, it begins to get pretty pricey for background music.

In Q-SYS, you can do up to 8 stereo or 16 mono playbacks by default, up to 6 hours of 24bit 48Hz mono WAV files. If this is genuine background music you will probably be distributing this out to mono listening environments so if you wanted 16 outputs, you'd want to use source files that are mixed down stereo to mono.

You can expand up to 130 hrs of storage for a fee (roughly equivalent to the cost of a Dante card, less than the cost four CIML4 cards for 16 analog inputs). Double the fee, you can get up to 260 hrs with a medium media drive. There's a large drive too that offers 1200 hrs of playback.

Within Q-SYS, you could set up your 8 stereo or 16 mono audio players and point them to different internal playlists. Playlist Zone A, Zone B, Zone C, etc, or Soft Rock, Elevator, Pop, etc.

You can also expand up to 128 simultaneous tracks for a fee but it's a sizable fee for just background music.

I'm reasonably certain you can update the playlists live via the Q-Sys administrator app but would have to verify that.

If you don't already have a vendor for this, feel free to drop me a DM.