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[Tim Barber]

Had a really strange one last Sunday.

It's a 6-month old X32 install that has had no issues previously. Ten minutes before service a loud buzz in the mains starts which appears on every active mix bus, but only after muting and unmuting Mute Group 6, which I have assigned to "kill everything". I power-cycled the board and reloaded my show file twice...after the second time the problem stopped. Everything worked fine from then on, and I can't reproduce the behavior, but now I'm paranoid. Any ideas?

[Rob Spence]

Someone nearby was also changing things, perhaps power tools or coffee urns.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[Kevin Maxwell]

Had a really strange one last Sunday.

It's a 6-month old X32 install that has had no issues previously. Ten minutes before service a loud buzz in the mains starts which appears on every active mix bus, but only after muting and unmuting Mute Group 6, which I have assigned to "kill everything". I power-cycled the board and reloaded my show file twice...after the second time the problem stopped. Everything worked fine from then on, and I can't reproduce the behavior, but now I'm paranoid. Any ideas?

When you are about to start a show or service and a problem happens it is very hard to think logically. After muting everything so you no longer have the loud buzz the next thing to do is determine if it is an input. There are a bunch of things that a musician can do on stage to cause this kind of problem. It can be something like an unplugged guitar that the connector is now touching something it shouldn’t. And they could do other things that can cause a buzz. I have had an instrument when turned off sends out garbage on its outputs.

With the X32 you can hit the Meters button next to the screen and quickly look to see if you have an input that looks like it is buzzing and then solo that channel and see if that is where it is originating from. And then mute just that channel and solo the outputs and see if it went away. Do you have your mutes set so that a muted channel is overridden by the mute groups? What I am asking is if you have a channel muted (for example CH5) and that channel is also in a mute group and you then cycle that mute group is it set in the way that CH5 then becomes unmuted or does it stay muted? If it is set this way you may accidently unmute a channel that is muted for a reason. So be careful because that channel might really need to stay muted.

[Tim Barber]

When you are about to start a show or service and a problem happens it is very hard to think logically. After muting everything so you no longer have the loud buzz the next thing to do is determine if it is an input. There are a bunch of things that a musician can do on stage to cause this kind of problem. It can be something like an unplugged guitar that the connector is now touching something it shouldn’t. And they could do other things that can cause a buzz. I have had an instrument when turned off sends out garbage on its outputs.

With the X32 you can hit the Meters button next to the screen and quickly look to see if you have an input that looks like it is buzzing and then solo that channel and see if that is where it is originating from. And then mute just that channel and solo the outputs and see if it went away. Do you have your mutes set so that a muted channel is overridden by the mute groups? What I am asking is if you have a channel muted (for example CH5) and that channel is also in a mute group and you then cycle that mute group is it set in the way that CH5 then becomes unmuted or does it stay muted? If it is set this way you may accidently unmute a channel that is muted for a reason. So be careful because that channel might really need to stay muted.

It wasn't on an input channel, I had time to check and those were all clean. It was on all 5 of my active bus channels and was present in the headphones when soloing the busses even with everything muted.

And Rob, they were setting up for coffee, but that happens every week. But who knows?

If it happens again, hopefully I will have time to do more extensive troubleshooting. 

[Kevin Maxwell]

It wasn't on an input channel, I had time to check and those were all clean. It was on all 5 of my active bus channels and was present in the headphones when soloing the busses even with everything muted.

And Rob, they were setting up for coffee, but that happens every week. But who knows?

If it happens again, hopefully I will have time to do more extensive troubleshooting. 

I meant to also suggest with that you look at the FX returns. I think of them as input channels. I have seen some weird things that can result from some of the FX returns when things get set a little bit weird.

I am not saying that there isn’t some glitch that you experienced, but 99% of the time it is usually some user error. As much as I have been using the M32 lately I have had a few times that I had a “what the **** is going on” moments. Including this past Sunday at a tree lighting ceremony outdoors in an intermittent drizzle. I was getting lost in the layers. I had the cover over the M32 for a lot of the event (with a layer selected that wouldn’t have any faders moving on it) and I was controlling it with my Android phone using Mixing Station Pro, which I use very infrequently.

[Tim Barber]

User error is always the prime suspect for anything more complicated than putting on my shoes, and I don't even get that right every time

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