It’s been brought to our attention that, for reasons beyond our control, this now happens when you try to connect to a Digi WiSP via an iPad or iPhone. It will appear in the list of networks, but is now pushed into a subsection along with any other devices that aren’t directly connected to the internet:
Good signal strength, but that’s clearly not enough for Apple devices these days…
The network may be selected, but as you go to join it, you will see the following warning:
It doesn’t need to be connected to the Internet, Apple!
If you hit “Join Anyway” a connection is supposedly established, but no WiFI signal strength icon appears in teh status bar, and the WiSP cannot be reached by the DP4 Remote app.
Half a connection is as good as no connection as far as the DP4 Remote App is concerned.
So where does that leave us? Unfortunately nowhere of any use 🙁
The WiSP is not totally useless now – it can still be employed to run AudioCore wirelessly, as Windows support has not been affected. To continue to use the DP4 Remote app, the best option is to upgrade your remote WiFi solution to our latest Walkabout kit, which uses a Moxa NPort wired Ethernet to serial adapter. This can then be plugged into any wireless router and you’re up and running again.
We have lots of info about this elsewhere online – read about the V4 kit here:
Not that type of gang – we’ve not gone all West Side Story on you…
Whilst checking out something wholly unrelated in AudioCore this very morning, I discovered a neat little feature that I (and I am glad to report no-one else here) knew about when you are working with ganged outputs.
So let’s assume for some reason you’ve ganged the first four outputs on a 448 together like this:
Outs 1-4 ganged. (and Ins A and B, as it happens…)
If I now go to the gains tab during editing, the gains will be linked and will all track together as expected, and the mutes will remain independent, as they do when operated via the front panel of the unit:
Gains will all be set to the same value and will track together if any of output 1-4 gain is adjusted. All as expected…
However…what I didn’t realise is that if I go to the EQ editing tab (where the output tabs for channels 2, 3 and 4 have been amalgamated to a single tab covering 1+2+3+4), there is also a Mute button. Its behaviour is different – it allows you to mute all the channels in the gang together, whilst leaving the individual mute controls accessible via the gains tab.
This mute button will mute/unmute all channels in the gang simultaneously.
If any channel in the gang is muted, this will show mute enabled – pressing it will set all mutes to the same state – it doesn’t just toggle the states – so if you turn it off here, all four outputs will unmute.
The same holds true of phase controls (always unganged via the front panel), but can be controlled as a gang via this control on the EQ editing tab.
Try it out – Very handy!
It’s funny the things you discover when you think you know it all 😉
I think we can safely say Richard wasn’t prepared for the level of dirt, sand and wind that was to meet him in the desert. If you saw the picture on Facebook posted yesterday in preparation for this final instalment, you’ll have an idea of the all-pervasive nature of the dust and how it can spell the end of humans and machines alike.
Amazingly, it still worked. We will see if that’s happening three weeks from now but it survived the trip. So did the laptop.
As we’ve covered the journey to get to the B.M. in quite exhaustive detail let’s just jump ahead to a few photos of the set-up and how things all went together. After the three hour drive along the desert edge, there was then the 6 hour queue to endure before getting on-site – this stretched for several miles and was four vehicles wide…
Following Richard and Oz was the gear truck, with the racks of APA ready for action. Here’s the plan view of the Ooligan Alley site – with the cockpit right in the centre below the road. The camp site is at the top of the plan formed by the rectangle of trucks with all the yurts accommodating up to 100 people.
Olligan Alley Site Plan.
And so the long process of assembling the yurts, moving speakers into place, wiring up the system and testing began. The new “control tower” – in reality a lighting tower – was built at the back of the site. It’s the hexagonal structure at the bottom of the plan.
Subs unloaded, cockpit and parts of control tower in the background…Craning the control tower together.View from the cockpit towards the completed control tower. And beyond into the desert!
The main system was all powered by APA and compared to last year (which you may have seen photos of here) the number of top cabinets was reduced due to the superior level and coverage available with the new Funktion One Evo7 boxes. Where there were six Res4s a side in 2014, this was now handled by four Evo7s a side in 2015.
The sub line-up was the same – six F221 cabinets a side (so totalling 24 x 21″ drivers).
This system was powered by nine APA, which were housed in one of the 20 foot containers (shown on the plan flanking the cockpit). There was one spare APA in case of any emergency, and some MC2 E Series on DJ monitor duties (Res2s).
Richard commented about the air conditioner that was in the container: “I thought it was a cool (sic) idea that it was in there, but honestly, I don’t think it made any difference! The container was painted quite a light colour which helped reflect some of the heat of the sun during the day, but at night, when the amps were working, it was pretty toasty in there…”
He continued – “As it turned out, we needn’t have worried – I was able to keep an eye on the temperatures and nothing was getting stressed, even at the height of each night’s events – we were operating at about 60% of maximum top line.”
On the dusty screen – the APA channel temperatures and mains supply behaviour in real time…
Oz Jeffries, the founder and M.D. of Audiofeed, had only good things to say about this new, leaner set-up:
“We took fewer cabinets and fewer amplifiers than ever before and yet had a more powerful and even better sounding system! What we didn’t take was a chance with APA – the results and reports so far from all users have been that it sounds amazing and it didn’t let the side down in the desert.”
Early morning with the DJ cockpit in place, flanked by Evo7 and F221s.
And so the B.M.B. reaches its conclusion for 2015 – APA helped to make it special for all who danced the night away in the Nevada desert, and made it through what many would see as the ultimate endurance test. Richard made it back without even catching a tan (as you’ll see from the laptop photo up above!). We’ll post up some pictures of the amps when they return and see how brown their air filters have gone!
…? That’s all we can say right now about the progress and current state of Richard and the APAs. With no internet access and very flaky mobile coverage, I received a text yesterday that could have been sent any time in the past two days that merely said “Leaving shortly, all OK.”
Whilst the festival carries on for another three days culminating in the burning of the man and many of the sculptures that had been specially built for the event, Richard will be arriving back in the UK some time today, with more information, and sand rashes where you shouldn’t get sand rashes.
In the meantime, certain publications have been granted access to report on the festival at large, so peruse our “curated” selection of the coverage from a US and UK perspective:
USA Today had this to say: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/02/dust-storms-burning-man/71616912/
whilst the UK, we have the art perspective the Guardian newspaper:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/sep/01/burning-man-art-installations-festival
and some great pictures here courtesy of the Daily Mail newspaper:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3220347/Home-sweet-home-Stunning-images-Burning-Man-campsite-filled-65-000-festival-goers-size-downtown-San-Francisco.html
Early next week we will have our own first hand news to pass on so please be patient whilst Richard washes the sand out of, well, everywhere and applies the after-sun…
The good news is that all amplifiers (the ones coming across America and the ones arriving in the huge shipment of equipment from Audofeed from the UK) have touched down in Reno awaiting departure to the festival site. Richard will fly into Reno tomorrow from LA – a relatively short 90 minutes before air conditioning and sand-free food becomes a distant memory. The final leg of the journey to the site is by truck – along State Route 34 – which is a surfaced road, but ending, still five miles from the camp, at Gate road…
Streetview stops here – the junction into the unknown…
By the way – “B.R.C.” refers to the site constructed for the festival – again copyrighted – so can’t use the phrase. The area is known as “Black Rock” and the site is laid out like a CITY on a grid system, so work it out!
Augmenting the aircraft in Ooligan Alley this year is the construction of a control tower to go with the cockpit DJ booth – we should have some more details of that next week, but as there is no mobile coverage unless you get the shuttle back to the nearest town (Gerlach), running every two hours during the day, and we’re not expecting many check-ins…
Richard has sent this link to the Large Hadron Kaleidoscope which is making its debut as part of Olligan Alley – the Kickstarter funded lighting project will offer a chill-out space like no other with three and a half thousand RGB LEDs forming an every changing sky of pattern and colour – check out their promo video:
We’ll be back next week when more information about how set-up has gone and how APA is coping in the extreme conditions but, in the meantime, let’s hope everything has survived the journey and our intrepid travellers successfully make their Reno rendezvous!
So as the set-up approaches, you might have noticed yesterday’s post mentioned about Audiofeed being involved, not for the first time in attending B.M. and sending a mass of gear over to power the Olligan Alley sound system. This system will be the new Evo cabs from Funktion One with subs and all powered by APA. You may have noticed the MC2 amps in one of yesterday’s photos. Audiofeed are big fans of MC2, as are Funktion One (as you’ll have gathered by their electronics line-up!) and in addition to APA, there are racks of MC2 amps that have been flown across too. These will be powering various other systems – some of which we get the feeling will be decided upon during set-up so watch this space for details of how everything ends up connected!
As a taster of what’s to come, this is how it all looked down Olligan Alley last year…
Just received this from Oz at Audiofeed too – cramming some last minute supplies into a rack before it jetted off. Remember it’s all about self-sufficiency when you’re in the desert for a week, and with the only supplies guaranteed to be available being coffee and ice, you still need to eat! Dancing boots are optional of course.
As for the travelling progress, well, Richard has left Frankfurt and should be well on his way to the first US stop in Los Angeles where he’ll be visiting a couple of people to fill them in on APA and no doubt drop it out in conversation that he’s on his way to B.M.!
The APAs coming from Group One should be in Reno late today and the UK contingent will, fingers crossed, arrive tomorrow – we will keep you posted…
We hope you all know what this might stand for. Having been in touch with the press office at the aforementioned B.M. offices to enquire about using the name or logo of their arts and music festival in the Nevada desert about this time every year, I was swiftly turned down. So, people of the world, you’ll have to just guess now as to what those initials stand for. One clue – the last word is “BLOG”. The other two rhyme with “Turning Flan”.
So the journey begins…probably the closest equivalent to Glastonbury here in the UK, but in the desert, B.M. is festival going for hard-core art lovers, dance music lovers, and probably lovers. Taking place in the midst of the Nevada desert, the entire site is built from the ground up each year, to a city grid plan layout all encircling the “Man” – a giant sculpture that ceremoniously gets burned at the end of the event, along with a significant number of the art exhibits that have been designed and built especially for the festival.
Whilst taking part is seen as fundamental to the entire experience, self-sufficiency during attendance is also high on the agenda. A philosophy of no commercial influence or commodification, leading to all who attend being responsible for bringing their own supplies (down to drinking water), also means that there is an element of endurance that is not present in other festivals. That said, anyone who has been to Glastonbury on a wet year would probably say they had endured plenty!
Individuals and groups visit from all over the world, setting up camps and enclaves within the temporary “metropolis”, some with a purpose of friends coming together to appreciate art and music and dance, others with performance and participation in mind. From the UK, AudioFeed, a Bournemouth based Audio and Lighting Hire company, have been attending B.M. for several years now, supplying (at their own expense – all events and performers only pay for their entry ticket like everyone else) a significant dance music system for the “Ooligan Alley” Theme Camp.
We’ll explore more of this when we have more photos of what is involved in the camp this year, but for now, let’s finish with the introduction and focus on what’s going on with XTA, APA and the intrepid Richard Fleming, as he crosses the planet to report back from B.M. for us.
AudioFeed are flying a huge amount of equipment out to the festival this year including six of the ten APA amplifiers that will form the heart of their mammoth dance system. The other four amps are being flown across the US from our distributor in New York, Group One.
The amps from the UK left at the start of the week and made it to AudioFeed on Tuesday.
Half a dozen APA fresh from XTA…
They were then racked and packed with the Funktion One Evo System and subs, other audio gear and made ready for transport to London where they were prepared for their long haul flight to the Nevada desert.
Racked and ready to roll. Rack and roll, then.
Now you see them… …now you don’t. Strapped and ready to fly.
Meanwhile, back in Stourport, Richard has packed some sandwiches and a juice box, and is ready to leave the UK on the first leg of his journey. He’s made it to London and is now at the airport waiting to board a flight to Frankfurt where he’ll change to the long haul flight which will take him the lion’s share of the way there.
Will he still be smiling when he realises he forgot to pack the factor 50?
As for the other four APA amps – well they’re already on their way across America to meet up in Reno, so tomorrow we’ll find out what’s arrived and what the plans are for this mammoth system, in surely one of the most inhospitable locations for a festival in the world….stay tuned for more!
Aten have flagged up an issue with a run of serial numbers for their converts that mean they won’t work with Windows 8. This might have been resolved for Windows 10 but in case you might be affected – this is what they said:
“If the 8th /9th digit of the serial number (S/N Z3DA-099BP-4304) is between A1~A9, AA~AZ, B1~B9, or BA~BK, it is not supported by Windows 8. Please use a “BL” or newer version of the UC232A with Win8. The serial number is located on the UC-232A”
Checking our stock of converters, it seems like these would be pretty old ones, and is only an issue in Windows 8.
If you are having problems in other versions of Windows, make sure you’ve got the latest drivers – they’re on our site here.
Remote control of our units has been built-in and considered since we first developed the DP100, with its options of MIDI, RS232 and RS485 interfaces.
As we always want you to be able to use you equipment no matter what interfaces they support for remote control or connecting peripherals, we try to find solutions that will enable this as simply as possible.
We have overhauled two of our solutions to simplify not only the parts required, but of course to also make things work better!
Firstly, long distance comms for RS485 connections to a PC or laptop.
We have tested many USB to Serial adapters over the years and our recommendation for a simple USB to RS232 adapter still stands – the Aten UC232A. Aten US-232a
This uses an industry standard chip (made by FTDI if you are feeling particularly techhie!) to handle the protocol conversion and this chip (and so its associated drivers) are also used in the DC1048, and the MC2 Ti1048 to provide a direct USB connection.
Our original solution to extending this to RS485 (as RS232 is limited to about 25 feet, although it will run reliably further at lower baud rates) so extending this range to 1000m and allowing a network of units to connect was to add an RS232 to RS485 adapter onto this. The KK Systems K2-ADE adapter worked well for this and so we had a kit consisting of the Aten adapter, the KK Systems adapter, and an D-type to XLR cable converter so you had a USB – RS485 on XLR solution ready to plug straight in. This KK Systems K2-ADE adapter is added to the Aten adapter to make it a USB-RS485 converter.
Recently, some users have been experiencing difficulties with this solution, especially under Windows 8 – issues with AudioCore not picking up all connected units, or not getting all data back from them successfully. This has turned out to be a Windows serial comms timing issue and beyond our control.
So we looked for a hardware answer to sort this out.
We came up with a new converter that offers a direct USB-RS485 solution in a much more elegant (and cost effective!) manner, and still uses the same reliable chipset as we have been used to. This adapter will replace the combination above for a more streamlined elegant solution direct to RS485 for AudioCore.
Note that this solution is for AudioCore only – we still have a different adapter to work with iCore for control of MC2 Ti Series amplifiers, processors and Dante breakout boxes. iCore does also support 4 Series (and DP548) as well as DC1048s and Ti1048s and so offers an alternative remote platform if you use these together. This USB-485 adapter is only for use with iCcore systems.
The iCore solution is this KK Systems adapter which again does direct USB-RS485, but due to the fact that the Ti Series products were forced to run at 57600 fixed baud rate (due to having to support Cobranet breakout boxes and their maximum data tunnelling speed), we have to do it slightly differently yet again!
All of this might feel a little confusing but it’s all summarised in the Remote Interface Guide (get it here) along with order codes and what’s supplied with each adapter, and a handy decision tree to help you choose the correct one for you application.
Going Wireless – new Walkabout Kit.
We’ve also been working hard on getting a new “Walkabout Kit” solution together, allowing both wired and wireless Ethernet connection to all units. Some of you have been experiencing problems with the latest DiGi Wisp WiFi to Serial converter – primarily seeing it on your list of available networks. A change in the firmware supplied with the units has unfortunately made them less than ideal to work with due to the fact that once we set them up here, if there are problems “in the field”, resetting them now renders them invisible on WiFi SSID searches, and they need to be manually reconfigured with a serial cable. We realsie this is just not practical in most circumstances. We will no longer supply them.
Instead we have changed to a Moxa NPort wired Ethernet to serial converter. This has several advantages. Firstly, and probably most importantly, upon a hard reset, the device can always be discovered and reconfigured as it has a wired Ethernet connection! Secondly, this solution can “go wireless” simply by plugging into a standard router, making it part of existing networks, instead of being an “ad-hoc” peer-to-peer connection. Lastly, it’s just much better! Set-up in greatly simplified and it’s more robust and reliable. Everything you would want!
Moxa NPort 5150 – a simpler, more reliable solution to Ethernet and Wifi remote connections.
The Walkabout Kit will no longer include an external USB-WiFi adapter as every device now comes with it built in and the quality has improved to the point that we don’t think it’s necessary to add this extra level of complexity. If you’re interested in finding out more about the Moxa Nport and how we configure it, there’s a guide on-line here which explains all.
This is it for hall 8.0. From next year, it’s all about halls 3, 4 & 5 as the show moves to a larger area, which is going to cause a great shake-ups in who goes where and there will, no doubt, be the haters and the lovers, as it were.
Let’s discuss that all later but this year, we were certainly in with the “lovers”. We loved it – our stand looked great, with APA front and centre attracting all sorts of great attention.
Before… …and after!
Set-up went very well, with the gamble on hanging a 6 foot screen running an animation of the APA meters designed to overlap a wall graphic, all designed “on spec”, coming together beautifully, even if I do say so myself! You can see it in action here…
APA generated a lot of interest, and it was great for both us and Funktion One…if you watched that short video to the end, the eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted that we had APA on demo in the F1 listening room. Originally they had agreed to have APA powering their formidable floor standing DJ monitor system – a beast in its own right.
What we ended up with, was APA powering their brand new Evo-6 system, making its debut at PLS 2015! It’s a testament to how good the amplifier sounds that they were happy to use it on their brand new system – it was running in 4 ways a side – 4 x F121s on a single channel, plus the 3 way Evo-6 box on the other three channels – and one APA per side.
After seeing the amps in action on the stand, it was great to be able to direct people to the demo room and let them have a listen to them in action – we had many unsolicited responses to them (and to the Evo-6 system which was sounding fantastic – the combination clearly worked well!) and all were wholly positive.
You obviously won’t be able to appreciate the quality in this video, but it’s still cool to see the amps at work in the room, and if you’ve never visited Funktion One’s demo room at PLS, it’s a suitably slick affair, all powered with XTA processing 96 channels in use this year) and using MC2 amplification (and some APA too this year!)
The other aspect of APA that was raising eyebrows, in a good way, was our demo of the remote software. We had two systems running- one on a Windows PC, and one on a Macbook Air – this was pleasing a lot of poeple to see that we were developing natively on both platforms and both were at the same stage. APA and PC
APA and Mac
With APA set to power some serious summer stages and clubs this coming season, it seems as if it’s gaining a great reputation already for top class sound quality as well as high power delivery and performance. Our theme for the show was “Processing Power” and this is exactly what APA does!
Going full circle now, the powers that be in Frankfurt have decided that the Pro side of things has run out of space (I would beg to differ as there was certainly extra divided off areas in hall 8.0) and wants to move not just the show, but the dates for 2016. This will mean four days still, but running Tuesday to Friday, and changing the times from 9-6 to 10-7. Ultimately, this doesn’t change the overall period the show is on for, but what might be significant is that the overlap between ProLight and MusikMesse will now be reduced as the all things musical instrument related show will now run Thursday – Sunday instead.
Only time will tell how much impact this will have on overall attendance. The move to halls 3,4 and 5 might be a good thing as they all open directly onto a central square, so inviting more outdoor sessions, which traditionally haven’t been that well attended.
Whatever happens, we will see you there next year, somewhere….!
