Installs Q-SYS Question about Paging

[Morte615]

I have a question about the Q-SYS product from QSC (http://qsc.com/products/Q-SYS_Integrated_System/) and wondering if anyone on here has used it. I tried to post to their forum but it won't let me and I figured someone here may have the answer

When I use the Page Router and send a page, what happens if the channel is muted? Does it unmute the channel to send the page? Also what if I mute the channel further down the stream, say right next to the output? I assume it will not unmute at that location but would like to be sure.

I have access to a core, but they are running production machines and I can't easily test something to see what it does. If I get something that I think might work I can do a test before leaving work but I really only have time to do one test a night (and then only the 2 nights a week that I close)

So anyone used this system before?

 

[MNicolai]

You would want your mic signal fed into your PA Router at a point in the signal chain where the mic is not muted. If you mute, compress, EQ, or otherwise process your mic source prior to its connection to the PA Router, any/all of those modules will remain in effect during a page.

Think of it this way -- each input into the PA Router module has a station control pin and an audio pin. The mic signal is always active going into the PA Router module, but not yet enabled to go out to any zones. When you activate a page (pressing the button on a page mic, or Talk on a Virtual Page Station, or the like) through whatever mechanism is connected to that Station Control pin, the mic signal paired with that control pin will be broadcast out to the zones.

If you wye your signal off of the microphone -- let's say you process it with a compressor and EQ, and then send one end of the wye off of the EQ to the PA Router, and another split of the wye off to a Matrix Mixer. Anything the PA Router does is independent of the Matrix Mixer. Mute that source on the Matrix Mixer, and the pages will still work. Activate a page from that audio source, and the level that source feeds into the Matrix Mixer will remain unaffected.

Taking a look at these videos from QSC may help guide you. Also, here's an 80MB download of QSC's Q-SYS training guide that may be helpful to you too.

 

[Morte615]

Thanks!
My worry isn't so much about the page inputs as the background music.
My PA Zone Router is very early in the design (pretty much the next thing after inputs) and the output of the router is routed to the zones and all the processing is done there (mixers, eq, crossover, ect.)

What I am worried about is if I mute the signal say in a speaker after the EQ, which is also after the PA Router, will it still allow a page to go through. Another way to say that, is say I want to mute an individual speaker in the zone to background music, but I still want emergency pages to go through.

This is a very large system and it has just kind grown as we go.

I think it would probably be a good idea to put the PA Router near the end of the chain instead of near the beginning but with the way the system is setup currently and used that is not always practical. The idea here is to get zone mutes outside of the PA Router so that we can mute something and not have it affected when a new preset of the Zone Router is selected. But due to emergency situations we need to still get the pages out to the zones even if they are muted.

So here is another question, if I mute the Zone output of Zone 1 in the PA Router, and a page comes through that goes to that zone, will it override the mute and send it out. I can mess with the priority levels if needed here that is not a problem.

 

[MNicolai]

In the block below, let's go through the following mute scenarios by Zone.

Zone 1 -- muting here mutes all output to this zone.
Zone 2 -- muting here mutes only pages to this zone. Messages and BGM (BackGround Music) will continue to play through.
Zone 3 -- muting here mutes only messages to this zone. Pages and BGM will continue to play through.
Zone 4 -- muting here mutes only BGM to this zone, Zone 4. Pages and Messages will continue to play through.

It's my understanding that you cannot do what you are looking to do with priorities. Priorities apply to Station inputs, and you cannot set a squelch priority for the BGM input. So let's say you wanted to silence pages out to a specific zone, you could use a squelch priority to do that, but if you want to silence BGM to a zone, you have to mute it at the BGM portion of the PA Router module.

Does that help you out more?

Also -- if in doubt, feel free to post a screenshot of your current file. Makes it easier to see what you're trying to do.

 

[Morte615]

Thanks that actually helped a lot. I did some testing last night after close and it seems that I will HAVE to mute inside the PA Router if I want to mute the BGM but not pages. There are a few other ways around that but that seems to be the easiest right now.

The problem I am trying to figure out is that from the PA Router the BGM goes to the individual zones, I am hoping for a way to mute only part of a zone to BGM while still letting a page go through. Say I have 4 speakers in a zone, I want to mute 1 speaker to BGM but leave the other 3 on, when an emergency page goes through I want it to un-mute that speaker for the page, and then mute it again when done. Is there a way to tell QSYS to return to it's prior state after doing a task? I don't think so but that would solve a lot of problems!

I will see what I can do to post a screen shot but I will have to be careful, the company I work for is very strict on confidential material. Not that I think there is anything confidential in this but they will probably not think that

 

[MNicolai]

The quick, and I assure you sufficiently dirty way, is to add more zones to the PA Router, and treat every amplifier channel or powered loudspeaker as a zone.

The more complicated, but overall cleaner way is to take advantage of control pins. You could send each zone out to 1xN (1x2, 1x3, 1x4, etc) routers, with each output of those routers going out to your respective amplifier channels or powered loudspeakers. Then, use a Priority control pin for each zone off of the PA Router to feel into a custom script for each zone's 1xN router. The script detects if the page coming through for a given zone is an emergency page, and if so, temporarily unmute all of outputs for that zone's router. In this case, temporary unmuting may mean when an emergency page comes through, you'd need a script to record the state of the mutes for that router, then unmute all outputs of that router, and following the page, recall the preset with the mutes recorded into it. That, times however many zones you have.

Guides for control scripting:
Q-SYS Knowledgebase
Q-SYS Control Script Training Videos
Q-SYS Control Script Quickstart Guide