The Conferencing Default Design
Video Transcript
00:08
The Core 110f is a perfect solution for a lot of small installations, especially small meeting rooms.
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In anticipation of this use, the new versions of Q-SYS Designer Software will come preloaded with
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sample designs geared towards different conferencing scenarios.
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In this video, we’re going to walk through a simple analog conference room design together.
00:30
Before we dive in, be aware that there’s nothing special about this design
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there are no tricks or fancy Lua coding – it’s simply a good start that saves you the time of building it yourself.
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You could use it exactly as it is or you could change it as much as you want.
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We’re going to show you how this default design works,
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as well as how to customize it for your own installation.
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Remember, by no means does your design need to match ours!
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In fact, that would be pretty creepy! You can use this design as a reference,
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or you could just throw it out entirely. It’s up to you! We are, however,
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presenting these components in their “best practices” scenario,
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and we’ll explain why we built things the way we did throughout the tutorial.
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One last thing. If you’ve been watching the other training videos,
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you know that we like to keep these videos pretty short and easy to watch.
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But there’s no way around it – this video is going to be on the long and boring end of the spectrum.
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So to keep you alert, we’re going to randomly insert Q-SYS-based dinosaur puns.
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That just happened. You should start off by finding the default designs on your computer
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that are installed along with the Q-Sys Designer software.
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Go to your User’s Documents folder and open the QSC Audio folder.
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There will be another folder labeled Q-Sys Designer 5.0, where you’ll find these default designs.
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You’ll notice that we’ve provided you a few different options –
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a VoIP version that uses a Softphone, and an Analog version that uses POTS.
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Go ahead and double-click the POTS file since we’ll be working on a POTS line.
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I’ve been working on my new POTS line at home. It’s a new series of terra cotta urns.
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Nope. We’re talking about Plain Old Telephone Service, abbreviated to POTS.
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Okay, so the first thing you want to do should do is rename your Core to match the Core in your installation.
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If your computer is connected to the same network as this Core, you can select Tools > Show
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Q-Sys Configurator to get a list of all Q-SYS devices on your network.
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You can click on a device to view its properties, including its IP address and subnet mask configuration.
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At the top, you’ll see the Core’s name. If you’d like to change the name of your Core,
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just type it in the box and click Update Settings.
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In fact you can verify this by pressing the ID button, and your device’s screen will display its name.
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Whether or not you renamed your Core, you’ll need to know its name
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in order to direct your design to use this Core. Go to your Inventory panel and select the Core,
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then go to its Properties panel and enter your Core’s name in the name field.
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Remember, the naming properties are case sensitive,
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so the easiest way to ensure that you don’t make a mistake is to just copy the name directly
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from the Configurator and paste it into the Core’s Property field.
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Now all you have to do is push your design to your Core by pressing F5
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or selecting Save to Core & Run, and you should be in business!
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Let’s go to the Main Schematic Page to look at this design.
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You can see all of the Core’s inputs in the orange box on the left,
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which flow through the middle blue box for signal processing and mixing,
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and are then delivered to the outputs in the green box on the right.
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We’ve done this to help keep you organized!
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You’ll notice that some paths are using both signal names and traditional wiring.
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We like the traditional wiring because it’s easy to see how the path flows from left to right,
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and we’re using the signal names to send these
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channels to the Meters/Testing page for monitoring purposes.
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The added benefit is that this lets us label our channels to make the design even easier to follow.
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And, we have a thing about color coding as you can see, so we customized those as well
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Again, you can do it however you’d like.
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The inputs and outputs are all Core components taken
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from Inventory panel and incorporated into the schematic.
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The Core 110f has 8 Mic/Line inputs, 8 line outputs, and 8 flex channels
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that can be configured as either inputs or outputs
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As you can see, the default design uses all 8 channels of the Mic/Line In component.
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If you double-click this component, you’ll notice that Phantom Power has been pre-activated
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for each channel because most conference microphones will need it.
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Four of the Flex channels have been configured as inputs for a Blu-ray player and another aux audio input.
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However, if your installation needs a different number of inputs and outputs,
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you can redistribute these flex channels here at the top of their control panels.
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Remember that if you activate a channel in one of these control panels,
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it will become deactivated in the other control panel.
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Finally, the telephone audio from the onboard POTS line enters, as well as the USB input audio.
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If you’re set up in the room, this is also a good time to begin gain-staging your inputs.
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The Preamp Sensitivity and Gain has been set to 0 for each of the inputs,
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which is a pretty safe start to allow for short bursts of louder input without clipping.
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Make sure you set your levels using an average distance for your speaking position as well as
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an average distance for your voice volume.
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Keep in mind that you might have some soft-talkers, or you might have some loud talkers.
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Giving the Q-SYS Acoustic Echo Canceler a strong clear signal is crucial to achieving a clean conference call.
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So take your time at this step because if an issue arrives later on, it might be due to improper gain staging.
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If you navigate to the “Meters/Testing Page”, you can see a bird’s eye view of all your input levels
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and make individual adjustments accordingly.
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All of the microphones enter this 8-channel Acoustic Echo Canceler,
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which is the first part of the “processing & mixing” section of our design.
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If you’re interested in an in-depth walkthrough of how our AEC works
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you can watch our Quickstart Video on the subject, but for now think of it this way:
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these microphones receive the audio of the human speaking into them,
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as well as the audio coming from the room’s loudspeakers
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that contains the person on the other side of the phone call.
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That extra audio has to be deleted from the microphone channels,
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or else the far-end caller is going to hear his/her own voice echoed back to them a half second later,
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which is very annoying. So the Acoustic Echo Canceler analyzes the audio in its Reference pin
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and deletes that from each of the microphone channels.
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In just a bit we’ll look at exactly what we’re using as this AEC Reference signal.
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Each of the microphones then goes through this Channel Group component.
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The Channel Group is a convenient way to apply a single set of EQ changes
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to multiple signal paths simultaneously. If you open its control panel,
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you’ll see that it’s applying a High-Pass Filter and a Parametric Equalizer to each channel.
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We have it preset to roll off at around 120Hz to cancel out low-end environmental noise.
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We also have an un-configured parametric EQ that you will want to tailor for your microphones
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for optimal use within your environment.
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Every channel in the Channel Group starts off active, which means that when you adjust these filters,
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the changes will be applied to all eight channels.
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If you want to make selective changes to specific channels, just change your desired channels
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and your changes will only be applied to the ones that are highlighted.
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Be aware that this component is not a mixer, so each output contains only its corresponding
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input audio along with the applied signal processing.
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Once the channels have been processed, they enter our Gating Automatic Mic Mixer.
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This component gates mic channels open or closed,
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manages the number of mics that can be open at a time,
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and regulates the attenuation of these channels as more open.
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For a complete walkthrough of this component,
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check out our video on Automatic Mixers in the Q-SYS Level One Training.
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This mixer also sums the eight mics into one channel that is delivered to a Matrix Mixer.
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Before we get to these two Matrix Mixers,
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let’s quickly go over the rest of the input processing coming in from our Flex Channels, POTS and USB connection.
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You’ll notice that the 2 stereo feeds from our Blu-Ray
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and aux inputs lead into Stereo Parametric Equalizers that you should tune specifically for these devices,
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and then into Stereo gain blocks. We have a similar scenario for our POTS and USB lines.
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The high pass filters are configured for low end roll off, the Parametric EQs for device tuning,
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and gain blocks at the end. All of these feed into the 5x8 Matrix Mixer.
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This Mixer handles the routing of every input to every output.
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Aside from the mixed-down microphone channel, you can see that it receives the POTS audio,
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USB audio, and the two stereo feeds from our Flex Inputs. Using the Matrix Mixer’s control panel,
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you can mix the amount of each of these inputs present in each of the output channels.
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In this default design, the first four outputs go to four of the Core’s committed Line Out channels,
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there’s an output to the POTS out and USB out,
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and then two stereo outputs that go to the four remaining Flex channels,
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which have been configured as output channels.
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Each of these output paths have an additional Parametric Equalizer and Gain block if needed.
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Now let’s look at this second Matrix Mixer
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which is nearly identical to the first one except that it does not receive the conference microphones,
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and its only output is the AEC Reference signal we spoke about earlier.
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This means that the AEC component will remove all of the audio from the microphones
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except for the intended human voices. This could have been accomplished within this first matrix mixer,
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but by putting it in a separate component we’ve made it more difficult for someone
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to accidentally disrupt this critical reference mix.
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Here at the bottom of the schematic are some controls over the POTS line
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including a keypad to input a telephone number
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(which you could also type manually using the Dial String field),
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a progress bar, and buttons to Connect, Disconnect, or enter Do-Not-Disturb mode.
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There is a local Contact List of names that you can input using the Administrator Tool.
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Just a reminder - If you're running Q-SYS Designer 8.0 or higher, the Contacts feature has moved to the
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Core Manager, which is only available when you're actually running on a core. So, you wont be able
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to emulate this without the hardware, but its functionality is still the same. Alright, back to it!
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Simply go to the “Contacts” tab and press the plus button to create a new local contact list.
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Then, you can select which book you’d like to edit,
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and add your contacts individually to your list to get saved to your local Q-SYS design.
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Or, link them using an LDAP server on your network for a more dynamically managed contact list.
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There are a few other Schematic pages that you may find useful – the Status Page
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shows the status block of the Core and the POTS connection to help you diagnose any potential issues
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The Meters/Testing page, as we’ve already seen, gives you RMS meters for every input and output channel,
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as well as some basic Test and Measurement tools to help troubleshoot your system.
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All that’s left is the User Control Interface, which has been designed for a TSC-7 touchscreen device,
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which provides the end user with access to the POTS connection controls and Contact List,
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as well as gain control over each of the outputs.
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Like everything else in this design, don’t be shy about customizing this dialer to suit your needs.
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Just remember that this UCI was built using layers,
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so if you’d like to change an element you’ll need to first select the Layer where that element is located.
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We’ve been saying throughout the video that you are free to make any changes
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that you want to suit your needs. Case in point
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Fake Hotel is putting in a new conference room with the need to integrate 10 tabletop microphone inputs,
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only one set of stereo inputs from a Blu-Ray player, 1 USB I/O for a PC to be used as a soft codec
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for web conferencing, 2 zones of ceiling speakers, and a POTS line for voice conferencing
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It sounds like the default design is already set up to handle most of this,
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but we need to increase the number of microphones to TEN instead of 8.
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So, how would you go about incorporating this into your design?
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First, I would start off by removing the Aux input blocks that you are not using,
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so delete the Stereo Parametric and Stereo Gain blocks from your design.
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That will free up two additional Flex channels for your microphones.
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Next, add two additional channels to the AEC component in its properties,
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and wire the new mic/line Flex Channels into the AEC component.
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We’ll also increase the channel count for our Channel Group component and the Gating Automatic Mixer.
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Now we can simply wire them up.
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Now there is one final thing to think about when editing this design – it’s incredibly simple,
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but also very important. It’s probably the most common mistake people make,
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and there’s nothing more embarrassing than calling in to our emergency Q-SYS hotline for something like this!
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Here it is: double-click your Matrix Mixer, and pay attention to the crosspoint knobs.
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By default, these are all set to -100dB, which won’t pass any audio along.
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If you want to route an input to an output, be sure to adjust these knobs accordingly.
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For instance, I want all four of my Line Out channels to carry the VoIP audio
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and USB audio on inputs 2 and 3, so I’m going to change these knobs to let them pass audio.
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I’d recommend setting them to 0dB for now,
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and then you can make any more adjustments later when your system is live.
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If you’re moving on to take the Level One Certification exam,
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don’t forget to adjust these crosspoint knobs as you change the design!
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And that’s the entire design. As we mentioned earlier,
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this is designed for conferencing microphones using the POTS line.
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If you have other demands with your flex channels or need to incorporate a Softphone with VoIP
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instead of the POTS line, you’ll want to use or customize the VoIP version of this default Conferrence design.
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And don’t forget, you can add or remove as much as you want, reorganize and relabel objects,
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customize the UCI, it’s entirely up to you. Designing a system is an art,
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so if you don’t like the way we built any part of this,
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feel free to do it your own way. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time.