NSI Melange Pro help needed!

[Cjack]

I know NSI gear is not the greatest , but in my role as tech guy for a great outdoor community venue in beautiful Wisconsin it's what we have for now (summerstageofdelafield.com). We've been getting by with manual 2 scene control boards for a few years (most of our young folks have never even seen one before). I recently acquired a Melange Pro that looks fine, but behaves strangely! I never used one before , but am pretty good at following directions. The manual is at times vague, but here's what's happening with my attempts to program and run.

1. When I enter and load a few cues, they all show on the screen, but only 1 out of 3 or 4 will run! They all load into the fader, but the GO button, does nothing but advance to the next cue. Up and down timers don't change (but the delay timer always works.).

I don't know the history of this board and it is 17 years old, but any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[VCTMike]

There are two GO buttons as you are probably aware (for C and D autofaders). Is the cue list loaded into the correct autofader? The loaded autofader is indicated on the screen with a "*" as the active one. Never encountered this problem before. I have experienced weird cue lists after a number of edits (>10) before saving and reloading the cue list. What happens if you load the second cue and press GO?

 

[microstar]

Do all of the cues show they have crossfade times attached to them? Maybe the times did not get recorded in the cues properly?

 

[VCTMike]

Do all of the cues show they have crossfade times attached to them? Maybe the times did not get recorded in the cues properly?

That shouldn't matter. Even a time of 0.00 works for up/down/delay....(at least on the one I'm using presently)

 

[Cjack]

That shouldn't matter. Even a time of 0.00 works for up/down/delay....(at least on the one I'm using presently)

Thanks so much for the quick response. OK... tonight I created and loaded 10 cues onto the C auto fader. All cues showed up, down and delay times. Hitting GO for each cue showed no response except the last cue entered (#10). the only "timer" that counted down was for delays (none on the cue that played. I also tried to soft patch channels to dimmers. They showed up on the soft patch list, but could not be played. I don't have a lot of experience with memory boards (ETC boards in the 90's that I recall as being easy and straightforward.)

Although I may have a boat anchor, any thoughts on diagnosis and repair? It may still be operator error, but I'm beginning to have my doubts. Is there a simple way to control my dimmers with the submasters (ie. soft patch as noted in manual)? Thanks again to both of you.

 

[VCTMike]

If your cue stack is not working, you can load submasters with looks (or groups). Set your desired channel levels, press record, press the bump button under the submaster you want to store it in. You have to remember to load the submasters when the board is turned on. Press Load (above the submasters), enter the submaster page (typically 1 unless you create more than 24 looks), press enter. The display should show the submasters loaded. Slide up the desired submaster for the recorded look.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

Minor hijack (instead of starting a whole new thread for this ancient board)

How are you supposed to switch submaster pages in playback mode? Load Submaster seems to actually load things *into* them (blocking Channel Window, even when I save my subs to page 2), rather than *selecting one for playback*... and as he suggests, the manual is very mediocre.