An MP3 player is not a professional audio device.

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An MP3 player is not a professional audio device.

Postby Malcolm Boyce » Fri Jul 03, 2009 2:50 pm

So after mixing monitors for the two days of Canada Day festivities on The Boardwalk, and numerous acts having "playback" from iPods or other consumer MP3 players, I gotta say, I hope this trend doesn't last long.

One of the most obvious things I've run into is crosstalk from left and right channels on these little deals. You know, cueing up the "track" and hearing the "click" from the other channel of audio bleeding in. Not so bad on stage, but out in FOH... Brutal!

The other flail is the cuing up time, and reliability of the display and playback of tracks. I saw a few flails with the drummer of an act trying to find the correct track for the next song on the list... "Not that one...... OK, how 'bout this one.... Nope.... how 'bout this one..." and so on.

Painful.
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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Fri Jul 03, 2009 3:01 pm

Sequences?

This I have experience with. I know how to get cross talk and how to avoid it. When I first started using sequences with click tracks last year, I had that problem. The click would bleed through the mains. The culprip was a Behringer mixer I was using. The crosstalk was happening in the mixer it self. so what I did is I split the cable right out of the mp3 player. Sending the click directly to a personal headphone amp then straight into my ears. Problem solved.

As far as cueing, I don't have a problem unless people start changing the set list around (which is often enough). I'm careful to name all the the songs CLEARLY so that I know which song is which easily enough.

An mp3 player is a relatively inexpensive way to get the job done. I think the problems you are describing are more user based though.

What was the setup this particular drummer was using?
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Postby Malcolm Boyce » Fri Jul 03, 2009 3:13 pm

Drumwaiter wrote:What was the setup this particular drummer was using?
There was more than one drummer that had electronics. I didn't have my hands as directly on it as did Warren who was on stage handling backline etc. Perhaps he will chime in. Oh Warren???

As you mention, the cheaper electronics, mixers, MP3 players, are just prone to not having the most discrete signal paths. The outputs of these players are the 1/8" headphone jack that is meant for consumer ear buds. I'm sure they would work well in lesser demanding situations, smaller clubs etc, but through a substantial rig a "little bit" of crosstalk is plainly audible.

I'm also curious about the lossy compression of MP3s possibly allowing some "crossing" of L-R material. This may require some testing to see what we find Matt. I can check some gear that I have here to see what we get. I don't have an iPod but some other brand players. I realize not all performers are necessarily using lossy compression, but I bet most are.
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Postby Malcolm Boyce » Fri Jul 03, 2009 3:18 pm

Drumwaiter wrote:I think the problems you are describing are more user based though.
I know that at lest one of the drummers was dealing with a setup that was handed to him. I was trying to ask him specifics about the rig, which included the playback and a multipad, and as soon as he realized what I needed to know, he basically said that the singer/leader set the whole thing up and he really didn't know much about it.

Simple questions like, "Is the left or right the click?" ...When you have 15minutes to do full change overs, having to trial and error that is a drag.
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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Fri Jul 03, 2009 3:40 pm

I have a relatively cheap SanDisk mp3 player and I don't get any crosstalk now that I run it properly.

Left is click for me. That channel gets split off and goes to a separate headphone amp. The right channel goes into a DI. I have had no trouble whatsoever in any setup this way. There is no crosstalk in my wiring, and there is none in the mp3 player.

So what was in their chain? I just have my doubts that it's the mp3 player is all. It's usually the [cheap] devices the we use to split the source that becomes problematic.

Malcolm Boyce wrote:the singer/leader set the whole thing up and he really didn't know much about it.

So I assume the singer was able to answer all your questions? But seriously, as a drummer I'd probably not put that in the hands of someone else, unless I wanted to have problems.

Again I say the problems described here is user(s) related. If someone could answer your simple questions and took the time to know how to organize and work an mp3 player, this thread probably wouldn't exist.
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Postby warrbeat » Sun Jul 05, 2009 9:32 pm

Chime! I gotta warn you, I've been watching lots of House so I'm very "Forensic" today.
On that day there were two acts which played back to back using a playback system and a drum machine of some sort. Both had technical difficulties with the playback however not the same problem. Before we get into the discussion...
The same XLR lines were run to the subsnake and no repatches were done between acts and both players used their headphones for the click but wedges for the remainder .

Act1 The drummer never had to hook up the system before and therefore didn't know what was what. The track and the system had been used numerous times in this band. They had an IPod with an extension cable so the lead guitar player could press play. The extension ran to a 1/4" split. The red jack went in the balanced input on the Behringer mixer, the yellow went into an LA Audio DI. The drum cat he was using ran into another LAA DI. Both the track and the sampler were feed back to the drummers wedge and the click was feed to the drummer via the phones output
After checking the track, we (Malcolm) heard a buzz. I checked the ground loop and nothing changed, then we disconnected the the extension and changed the DI to a BSS and switched the ground loop. The buzz got considerably (at tolerable level) less. Malcolm and Shelley set a level both thru all monitors and front of house and the band played on.

Act2 had a tube like Sony MP3 player (with a very small screen) that had a recently mixed track loaded on it that day. 1/8" - 2x1/4" lines. In this case the mixer supplied was given to him "pre connected" completely including: red 1/4" to balanced input on "Behringer like" (I can't remember what kind it was) mixer. The yellow to a prewired Radial Design DI. The only difference was there was a second 1/4" cable from the link back to the mixer. The thought was to be able to mix his own level of the playback into his cans. I unplugged the XLR from the DI from Act1 and plugged it into the RDI supplied. He used the identical DI that the previous band used for his Roland Handsonic. We achieved signal for both and moved on.... We later found the click through the play back line throughout monitors and FOH.

The FOH operator first blamed the patch, then the connections then didn't have anymore ideas. Since there was only a mono signal coming from the DI, having both the click and the playback on the same line means it had to be from one or a combination of places including: a faulty splitter cable, crosstalk inside the mixer which came back through the link creating a loop, the MP3 player could have been set to mono playback or the track had been improperly mixed down although the latter is improbable but not impossible as it was recorded and tested in the studio but not with the player.

Two very similar situations back to back.... biggest difference was the complexity of the set up and the fact that one system was tried, tested and true and the other was freshly crammed into a player probably minutes before arriving for sound check.

I agree with Matt regarding the labelling and ease of launching the MP3. I'm not one to talk about players as I'm using my phone right now....

I would love to have a MINI pc playing WAV files featuring a touch screen with a big PLAY button filling the screen and a USB audio interface into a 2 channel balanced output.

Remember, you asked me to chime in....
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Postby Malcolm Boyce » Tue Jul 07, 2009 12:30 am

OK nerds, here's what I have found out.

I did a little testing tonight because I was curious. I made a file, 44.1/16 with a -6dbfs 1K tone in one channel, and digital silence in the other. I encoded it to various bit rate MP3 files using various encoders. Although I found some interesting artifacts at the end of the files on the "blank" channel, no "cross talk" was created in any of the files by the lossy encoding. Perfect -96db silence. So that little part of the question is answered.

I then took one of the 128K fixed rate MP3s of the file, and played it back through various pieces of hardware into my DAW, careful to calibrate levels the same for comparison. The outputs were:

1- RCA Lyra MP3Player Headphone Out
2- HP Pavilion Laptop Headphone Out
3- Palm Treo 650 Headphone Out
4- M-Audio USB Mobile Pre Line Out

Results were all over the place. The RCA player had channel separation of around 60 dB. Although it seems like a lot, the tone was clearly audible at high levels in the "silent" channel.

The Laptop Headphone out fared the worst of all three. Only about 40 dB of separation. The tone was even higher above the noise floor than with the RCA Lyra.

My Palm Treo was the first of the "headphone" connections that provided enough channel separation that I couldn't hear the tone above the noise floor of the "silent" channel.

As I expected the only proper line connection, the Mobile Pre, provided complete channel separation between the tone and blank channel as well.

So, of the four playback methods I tried, we're batting .500 for having enough channel separation for use in a high level environment. I wish I could try an iPod, it being so poplar and all, but I don't have one in the house.

I'd say this proves that the MP3 player itself can be the cause of crosstalk between track, and "click" channels when used the way that we're finding more and more these days. If you're using a setup like this, best be careful how you're rig is put together, and take the time to check it out before showing up to an important gig through a large rig, to find out your player's headphone jack output isn't going to keep your click track out of the FOH mix.

warrbeat wrote:Act2 had a tube like Sony MP3 player (with a very small screen) that had a recently mixed track loaded on it that day. 1/8" - 2x1/4" lines. In this case the mixer supplied was given to him "pre connected" completely including: red 1/4" to balanced input on "Behringer like" (I can't remember what kind it was) mixer. The yellow to a prewired Radial Design DI. The only difference was there was a second 1/4" cable from the link back to the mixer. The thought was to be able to mix his own level of the playback into his cans. I unplugged the XLR from the DI from Act1 and plugged it into the RDI supplied. He used the identical DI that the previous band used for his Roland Handsonic. We achieved signal for both and moved on.... We later found the click through the play back line throughout monitors and FOH.

The FOH operator first blamed the patch, then the connections then didn't have anymore ideas. Since there was only a mono signal coming from the DI, having both the click and the playback on the same line means it had to be from one or a combination of places including: a faulty splitter cable, crosstalk inside the mixer which came back through the link creating a loop, the MP3 player could have been set to mono playback or the track had been improperly mixed down although the latter is improbable but not impossible as it was recorded and tested in the studio but not with the player.
After what I've found in my little experiment, and by what you describe there, it seems likely the player itself caused the crosstalk we heard. Like we said, assuming the files were good, hardware somewhere is to blame.
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Postby warrbeat » Tue Jul 07, 2009 7:25 am

Interesting.... thanks Malcolm. After sharing this discussion with Dean he also suggested that the IPod seems to be the industry norm for low to mid range money solutions. Although it does seem like a, to quote Dean, "gay" way to play files, there's a good chance my cell phone has a better chance than atleast 2 other sources... I just found my old Creative Nomad Jukebox. It has 2 1/8" outputs. Maybe I should bring it along to the Salty Jam and we can experiment a bit on some down time at the Salty Jam stage and PA.

By the way, I believe that drummer with the bleeding track disease uses his MP3 player in other high output situations.... if so, why just that track? It would be cool to find the problem was in the link to $70 mixer... just cause...

talk amonst yourselves....
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Postby macrae11 » Tue Jul 07, 2009 8:26 am

Malcolm Boyce wrote: I wish I could try an iPod, it being so poplar and all, but I don't have one in the house.


Hey Malcolm. Send an mp3 or two over this way, I have a couple of iPods I could try it out on.
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Postby Malcolm Boyce » Tue Jul 07, 2009 1:04 pm

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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Tue Jul 07, 2009 1:21 pm

Malcolm Boyce wrote:Test file for everyone!


Thanks! I've had no noticeable problems with my Sandisk player, but I'd love to be able to really test it. I'll post my findings.
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Postby macrae11 » Tue Jul 07, 2009 4:04 pm

Just curious Malcolm, not that I think it would be an issue, but did you test the crosstalk between channels on your interface? Just curious if that might skew the results, as slight as it might be.
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Postby Malcolm Boyce » Tue Jul 07, 2009 4:08 pm

macrae11 wrote:Just curious Malcolm, not that I think it would be an issue, but did you test the crosstalk between channels on your interface? Just curious if that might skew the results, as slight as it might be.
I knew a smart guy like yourself would ask that question, and that's why I went so far as to use two inputs that didn't share any analog signal stage.

I do like to be thorough.
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Postby macrae11 » Tue Jul 07, 2009 5:22 pm

Good work! :-P . I'll try to load it up tonight if I get some time.
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Postby macrae11 » Wed Jul 08, 2009 9:28 am

Well I had the chance to test out two different iPod's The first one I tried was my little iPod shuffle that I use at the gym. I wasn't expecting to much from this guy. First it took me about ten minutes to scroll through all the songs until I found the right one. No screen makes it a little more difficult to find things. Anyways once I got it set up, I was getting the tone showing up in the blank channel at about 52 dB down. Not great.

Next I tried out my 120GB iPod that I use most of the time, in the car, house music for shows etc. I actually had complete separation through the headphone jack, at least down to -130dB, which was as low as I could measure. I was going to test the dock output as well, but figure there wouldn't really be a point since the headphone jack tested so well. It might be a good trouble shooter for you to have on hand though Malcolm. That way the iPod can spit out a line signal, and it bypass' the iPod volume controls. Something like this guy.
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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Wed Jul 08, 2009 10:15 am

I'll take some time to try this tonight with my Sandisk player. Again, I haven't had any problems (that I know of) with it, but it would be nice to test it scientifically.

At the end of this we should post a top 3 list of recommended mp3 players.
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Postby Malcolm Boyce » Wed Jul 08, 2009 12:47 pm

macrae11 wrote:I was going to test the dock output as well, but figure there wouldn't really be a point since the headphone jack tested so well. It might be a good trouble shooter for you to have on hand though Malcolm. That way the iPod can spit out a line signal, and it bypass' the iPod volume controls. Something like this guy.
I haven't seen anyone using anything like that to get a proper line out of their iPod.

I understand the convenience of a portable MP3 player, but how hard is it to carry a laptop with something like this to have a far more suitable source of your tracks?

I say again. For small club work, and other less demanding circumstances, Yes. Through several thousand watts of PA, in front of 1000+ people... how reliable is it? With so many different units out there, how could I seriously suggest this is a good idea to someone when there's a good chance you'll end up on a stage with only 50db of channel separation?

Instead of trying to compile a list of portable MP3 players that "pass" our little test... out of the literally thousands of units on the market, we should be trying to suggest a better, more reliable solution to potential users.

I anxiously await the results of Matt's test on his device of choice. I'm routing for you buddy.
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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Wed Jul 08, 2009 12:51 pm

Malcolm Boyce wrote:I anxiously await the results of Matt's test on his device of choice. I'm routing for you buddy.

I've been on a roll this week with a lot of stuff. The test will no doubt go well. I can't wait to try this out.
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Postby macrae11 » Wed Jul 08, 2009 1:43 pm

Malcolm Boyce wrote:
I understand the convenience of a portable MP3 player, but how hard is it to carry a laptop with something like this to have a far more suitable source of your tracks?


I don't know, I think it depends on the stage. I mean if you were on a big stage like this, but you were one of the middle acts, and things are being done festival style with barely time for a line check, let alone a good sound check, just being able to plug in an mp3 player saves a lot of hassle. Or if you're going on tour and space in the van is at a premium. Or if you don't own a laptop. Or you have a laptop and it's not reliable. I've never had an issue with reliability with my iPod, but I've dealt with several reliability issues with laptops with external sound cards.

I think the issue is not the device, but how prepared the user is. If a decent player is used, that has been carefully set up and calibrated with the proper hook ups, there should be no issues with using an mp3 player for playback.
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Postby Malcolm Boyce » Wed Jul 08, 2009 2:07 pm

macrae11 wrote:I don't know, I think it depends on the stage. I mean if you were on a big stage like this, but you were one of the middle acts, and things are being done festival style with barely time for a line check, let alone a good sound check, just being able to plug in an mp3 player saves a lot of hassle. Or if you're going on tour and space in the van is at a premium. Or if you don't own a laptop. Or you have a laptop and it's not reliable. I've never had an issue with reliability with my iPod, but I've dealt with several reliability issues with laptops with external sound cards.
So what you're saying is... We're screwed no matter what happens.

My experience so far with these things has been that the size and "convenience" of these little buggers has been outweighed by other factors.

macrae11 wrote:I think the issue is not the device, but how prepared the user is. If a decent player is used, that has been carefully set up and calibrated with the proper hook ups, there should be no issues with using an mp3 player for playback.
I agree wholeheartedly.

I do think that the tools to create backing tracks like these, being readily in the hands of the less "tech savvy" is where our problem is coming from.

I've just had to deal with folks with the "It can't be the player" attitude, who really don't have a clue.

So what you're saying is, this is another case of, don't blame the tool, blame the tool using it...?
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Postby macrae11 » Wed Jul 08, 2009 2:26 pm

Malcolm Boyce wrote:
So what you're saying is, this is another case of, don't blame the tool, blame the tool using it...?


Exactly. Or at least blame the tool for choosing the wrong tool for the job.
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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Wed Jul 08, 2009 2:52 pm

Hey guys, I've used this at the 3 Mile many times with no problems since I've eliminated the Behringer mixer. Sure if I was to have a problem it would come out there yes? Maybe I'm mistaken though.
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Postby macrae11 » Wed Jul 08, 2009 3:07 pm

How are you using it? click one side, samples on the other?
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Postby Mathieu Benoit » Wed Jul 08, 2009 3:11 pm

macrae11 wrote:How are you using it? click one side, samples on the other?


Yes, and the click is super loud.

I connect the mp3 player to a 1/8" TRS to male XLR cable that's about 6 ft long. It connects to a female XLR that goes out in a Y to a pair of 1/4" connectors, the left (click) channel goes to my headphone amp, the right (music) channel goes to a DI that goes to the front of house. All the cabling in this rig was custom built of course.
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Postby macrae11 » Wed Jul 08, 2009 3:34 pm

Yeah it should show up there, although it does depend somewhat on the room and the mix. Try Malcolms little test file, and it will show you if there are any issues at all.
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