System Redundancy

Now let’s talk about some of the Redundancy options in your Q-SYS system

and show you how quickly the system can recover from a hardware failure.

In a basic signal path, your Core is connected to your network

through which it communicates with any I/O Frame.

Now you can have a backup Core on your network as well as a backup I/O Frame,

and since every Core and every I/O Frame has two Ethernet ports,

you can also employ a backup network as well.

Now in addition, you can have an amplifier redundancy with the help of QSC’s DAB-801,

which is the DataPort Amplifier Backup panel.

Now we’re going to simulate a possible failure for each of these elements

so you can see for yourself how the system reacts.

Now you can see in our design here that we have a Core with a backup,

an I/O Frame with a backup, as well as the DAB-801.

When we save our Design to the Core by pressing F5,

you’ll see here that we have a status bar for our Core,

and a green LED lets us know that the Primary Core is running.

Our amplifiers and I/O Frame are still initializing,

but as soon as they’re finished then we’ll hear our Audio Player, which you can hear right now.

Now we’re going to simulate a Core failure by unplugging the power to the actual unit.

When the Primary Core fails, the network will switch over to the Secondary Core,

and as soon as that Core is active we’ll receive a notification of what has happened.

Next we’ll simulate a failure with the I/O Frame by unplugging it as well.

Once again we’ll get a brief interruption in the audio while the Core reports the situation,

and the Backup I/O Frame will switch from Standby to Active mode.

The amplifiers all shut off so there are no pops in the system,

as soon as they’re back up our audio is restored.

We can also unplug the Ethernet cable – and because this network is redundant

you’ll notice that we won’t have any audio dropout as long as one cable is plugged in.

We can take one out, trade one in for the other, and the audio will continue uninterrupted.

Finally we can simulate an amplifier failure.

We can unplug this amplifier, and the DAB-801 will switch the system over to the backup amplifier

and once again our audio path is restored.

That completes the redundancy demonstration for the Q-SYS signal path.

Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time.