Audio Components

Welcome to another QSC Q-SYS Designer software tutorial.

In this tutorial we’re going to briefly cover some of the other features in the software

and go over some of the DSP components that you’ll find.

Now by now you’re probably familiar with the Left and the Right-Side pane,

so we’re going to start off in the Schematic Library …here in the Right-Side pane.

This is where you’ll find all of the DSP to add to your system,

and to do so is as easy as clicking on the component that you want and dragging it into your Schematic.

Now there are three branches here you have your Audio Components, Control Components, and Layout.

Now the Audio Components are going to affect your audio. Some of these are simple,

some of them have their own tutorial videos, we’ll go through them real quickly right now.

The Audio Player plays MP3s and WAVs that are loaded to your core.

Audio Streaming lets you connect to another device on your network to either send or receive a streaming signal.

Crossfader lets you fade between two channels.

A Crossover divides your signal into different bandwidths to distribute them to different loudspeakers.

The Delay will introduce a signal delay. The Dynamics – you’ve got a lot of options here

it branches out and you can see things like a Compressor, an Expander, a Peak Limiter,

these all let you adjust the signal dynamics, and this also has the Gated

and Continuous Ambient Compensator which will help take out background noise,

and there’s a separate tutorial on how those two work.

Moving on, you’ve got Effects – this branch gives you a lot of common effects,

things like your Doppler, the Echo, and the Flanger, these are all customizable of course.

Equalizers and Filters branches out, this gives you a lot of things like your Low-Pass Filter,

and a Graphic Equalizer, Parametric Equalizer, there’s other filters of course.

The Gain here gives you a gain adjustment to your signal,

the Gain Ramp will create a timed adjustment to the gain,

a Meter will create an RMS Meter for your signal wherever you attach it, the Mixers

we’ve got four different mixers in here – and a few of these like the Gated Automatic Mixer

and the Gain-Sharing Automatic Mixer, we’ll cover these in other tutorials.

Public Address lets you set up your Paging System with the PA Router and the Virtual Page Station.

The Room Combiner lets you create a system for a room that has removable air walls on it

and this one also has its own tutorial.

Router provides simple channel routing, a Signal Presence will let you

use it to detect the existence of an output signal,

System Mute will obviously mute the system – a lot of these are very self-explanatory,

and then Test and Measurement offers a bunch of tools for testing your system

and we’ve got a tutorial on that as well.

So we’re not really going to go into all of these components in this tutorial

– we just want to show you where they are,

and they’re really easy to use as long as you know how to access them, drag them into your Schematic,

wire them together, open their control panels, you should be familiar with all of these things by now.

If you ever find something you don’t understand,

they all have very detailed help files so feel free to check out that database as well.

One thing I would like to show you, though, is some of the ways you can customize a component.

So let’s go over here and grab a Matrix Mixer and drag that into our Schematic.

One thing you can customize is adding control pins.

If you go to the Right-Side Pane and take a look at the Control Pins menu, then you can toggle extra pins.

For instance if I check the Input 1, Mute control pin here,

you’ll notice that I’ve got a new bar on my component that I can wire with new pins.

What these do is allow you to create unique logic and scripting interaction between components.

So let’s say that whenever this input goes Mute, I want a specific audio file to play

so what I could do is wire the control pin for this Mute to the Play button of that Audio Player,

and then it would do it for me. So there’s a lot of cool things you can do like that.

Now another way that you can customize components

is within their Properties the properties of that actual component.

Let’s say that on this Mixer I want to change the inputs – let’s change the inputs from 8 down to 4

you can see that reflected, now we have only four inputs. Let’s change it all the way up to 254.

Boom! Now we’ve got a whole lot of them.

And you can see that if we open this up, that 254 is clearly more than we can even see on the screen,

right here we’ve got about thirty of them. We’ve got this new bank up here that says Input Bank

which will allow us to toggle which set of thirty-two inputs at a time we’re actually even looking at.

So even that aspect of the component will change based on what you’ve done to it.

Let’s turn this back to something manageable again, let’s make it 4 by 4,

and say goodbye to our input bank. Now another thing you can do for this mixer,

for instance, is we can change it into something visually different entirely.

Let’s go to this 2-D Matrix Panner and select Yes.

Now the visual representation of this component is completely different and I’ll show it to you,

I’ve got to enter Emulation Mode here by hitting F6,

now this mixer is no longer controlled by those gain knobs,

but you drag your input closer or farther away from certain outputs

and that controls the volume that you want that input to go to.

Ultimately the point is that the component that you pull out of the Schematic Library

might not look like what you’ll end up changing it to,

so you should really spend a lot of time looking at all the properties

for your components so you can find out what it is that they’re capable of.