Wiring
| Site: | QSC |
| Course: | Q-SYS QuickStarts |
| Book: | Wiring |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Wednesday, 4 December 2024, 12:12 AM |
Description
Video Transcript
00:06
All right, let’s get started.
00:07
We’re going to build out a very small PA system here,
00:11
just with a couple of rooms.
00:13
It should be pretty easy to extrapolate how you would
00:16
expand that for a much larger system.
00:18
I’m just going to show you the basics at this point,
00:21
and then if you need to add, you know,
00:23
100 page stations and 100 zones,
00:26
you should be able to figure that out on your own.
00:28
So, in CUSIS Designer software,
00:30
we’re going to go to the schematic elements library.
00:34
We’re going to look in the audio components,
00:36
and there’s a section called Public Address.
00:38
There are only two objects in here: the PA router
00:41
and the virtual page station.
00:42
We’re going to need both of those.
00:44
So, I’m going to bring in the PA router and the virtual page station.
00:48
As you drag the PA router in,
00:50
you’ll immediately see that it is configured for
00:53
eight stations and eight zones.
00:55
You hover your mouse over the inputs,
00:57
and it’ll tell you what those represent.
00:59
We’re going to adjust that for our setup.
01:02
By the way, if you’ve got a core,
01:05
you should absolutely follow along with me,
01:07
everything that I do.
01:08
If you don’t have a core,
01:10
there are going to be some areas that
01:12
you’re limited and you can’t access,
01:13
and you’re not going to be able to have as much fun.
01:15
You can still follow along by all means;
01:17
there’s lots of stuff you can do in the administrator.
01:19
But realistically, this is one you kind of need some hardware for,
01:23
especially if you want to issue any pages
01:25
because then you need a microphone.
01:26
So, I’ve got my virtual page station, here’s my PA router.
01:29
I’m going to adjust the properties.
01:31
I’m going to say I have two stations rather than eight,
01:35
and I’m going to say there are five zone outputs.
01:38
We’re just going to say there are five rooms for us,
01:40
and that’ll let me kind of zoom in a little bit and get a little bit closer here.
01:45
So, I’ve got a virtual page station with a triangular pin.
01:51
If you can’t figure out where to wire that to, then I’m sorry,
01:54
your days with CUS are over.
01:57
This is pretty simple: triangles go to triangles.
02:00
So, I’m going to wire my triangle to the triangle right there.
02:03
If you hover over the pin, it says “Station 1 Control.”
02:05
Now, above that is a pin that says “Station 1 Audio.”
02:10
I would argue that this is actually not the best name for this pin.
02:15
“Station 1 Audio” implies that you would need to
02:19
wire any kind of audio that you’re going to be
02:20
making from this page station through that pin,
02:22
and that is not true.
02:25
This pin should be labeled “Station 1 Microphone.”
02:28
Only a microphone would ever be wired to this pin.
02:32
I’ve seen people get this wrong and think that because it says
02:35
“Audio,” they need to grab an audio player and play
02:40
their messages from this pin.
02:43
That makes sense if you haven’t watched my video,
02:45
but fortunately, you’re watching the video and
02:47
you’ll never make that mistake, right? Good.
02:50
This is wrong. Don’t do this.
02:52
When you send a message in a PA system,
02:56
that message is played from within the PA router itself.
02:59
You don’t need to waste an audio player;
03:01
you don’t need to waste any of your audio player tracks
03:04
in order to have messages play in your system.
03:06
The PA router is basically like a big giant thing that can
03:10
play as many audio files as you want from within it.
03:13
Which actually means, if we want to be sneaky—
03:16
my boss is not in the room right now,
03:17
so I’m allowed to tell you this
03:18
—if you want to be sneaky and you’re ever doing
03:20
a design and you just need one or two more audio tracks,
03:24
you could use a PA router and play messages through it.
03:27
It’s not perfect because the PA router will take like
03:29
half a second or so before it plays the audio file,
03:32
unlike an audio player which is already ready
03:34
to be queued up and plays the moment you hit the play button.
03:36
But I’ve done that before.
03:37
I’ve been like, “I just need one more audio track,
03:39
I’m going to use a PA system.”
03:41
Anyways, the reason why I’m going to be replaced
03:45
in the next video is because I’m giving away the trade secrets.
03:47
Anyways, so this is a microphone pin.
03:51
I happen to have a microphone connected to the
03:53
first mic channel of my core that I’m connected to,
03:56
so I’m going to wire in my microphone to that
04:00
station one microphone pin.
04:03
Here I have my first station.
04:05
I have an input for my mic or my voice,
04:08
and I have the control that is within the virtual page station
04:11
to issue those commands.
04:12
Now, I also have under the desk here that physical page station,
04:15
so I’m going to add that too.
04:17
You can find it in the audio Q-Lan branch of your inventory.
04:23
There’s a section called Page Stations.
04:25
There’s the PS600 and the 1650.
04:28
Slight difference between the two of them.
04:30
There are also two models of each of those.
04:32
One of them has a handheld mic like we saw,
04:34
the other one has a gooseneck mic that sprouts out of it.
04:37
But in here, it’s the same.
04:38
I’m going to add the 1600,
04:40
and I’ll tell you what the difference is in the keypad just a little bit later.
04:43
I’m going to drag in the mic control components,
04:46
and here once again we see that exact same thing:
04:49
the microphone and the control.
04:51
If you once again can’t figure out how to wire it up,
04:54
then you are doomed. Sorry.
04:56
All right, so I’ve got my two stations wired up.
04:59
By the way, the PA router itself,
05:01
when I changed its properties to adjust the number of stations and zones,
05:06
it’s worth noting that if you hover your mouse over any of these properties,
05:09
it’ll tell you what the range is.
05:11
A single PA router can handle up to 256 possible stations
05:16
and up to 512 possible zones.
05:19
So, if you’ve got an installation that requires more than that,
05:25
I am so sorry for you and all of your life choices.
05:28
That is a lot.
05:31
There is a way that if you ever possibly need more channels than this,
05:37
you could hook these up to another core that’s
05:40
also in the same world and send pages from one core to the other.
05:43
We’ll talk about that at the end of this training.
05:46
But generally speaking, we found that 256 stations
05:49
and 512 zones is more than enough.
05:52
We’ll talk about the rest of these properties a little bit later.
05:56
It is also really worth noting that the PA router
05:58
—you can only have one of them in your design.
06:01
Even if you have a system that’s managing what you would
06:05
consider to be completely segregated paging systems that
06:08
are maybe in different buildings or they don’t
06:10
interact at all or whatever it is,
06:12
you still have to manage that through the one
06:14
PA router in the software.
06:16
That’s still going to be able to handle all of the
06:18
channels and zones and everything like that.
06:20
You’ll just have to make sure that the page stations
06:22
for those segregated areas only have access to the
06:25
zones that are relevant for them to page to.
06:28
All right, so we’ve got our output zones here.
06:31
Again, a zone could be a single speaker,
06:33
it could be a thousand speakers.
06:35
But right now, it comes out as a mono channel because
06:37
we’ve got our one microphone that we’re talking into.
06:39
I’m just going to use some signal tags for now to represent these.
06:43
I’m just going to type in the destinations that we
06:47
would use from our level two class.
06:49
So, if you’ve taken level two, you might be familiar with this.
06:51
I’m going to use the lobby as our first zone.
06:55
We’re going to use the conference room as our second zone,
06:58
and then we have a multi-purpose room that can be divided into three different rooms.
07:03
So, NPR 1, 2, and 3, and those will be the zones
07:07
for our fake little demonstration here.
07:10
This is in the instance of a fake hotel.
07:12
These are all areas in our hotel that we’re going to be paging,
07:16
like a nice little instance of a small hospitality venue.
07:20
Okay, wiring-wise, the only thing that we haven’t
07:22
integrated yet is the ducking system,
07:25
and I’m going to save that for a little bit later because
07:27
I want to show you the ducking live.
07:29
I can’t show you the ducking unless we’re actually issuing
07:31
some pages and some messages,
07:33
so I’m not even going to wire it up yet.
07:35
We’ll save that for closer to the end.
07:37
Right now, we’ve got our stations hooked up,
07:40
we’ve got our microphone coming in.
07:41
Oh, but first, let me, of course, name my page station
07:44
so that it matches the name of the page station that’s on my network.
07:48
I have named mine “training.ps600,” and that way,
07:52
we’ll connect properly.
07:54
I’ve also got my touchscreen that’s already here.
07:57
I’ve got another core, which we’ll talk about a little bit later.
07:59
All right, now my devices are named properly.
08:02
We’ll save to the core and run,
08:05
and we’ll get this system up and running.
08:08
Okay, I’m connected to the core.
08:09
Let’s get some of these devices up here.
08:11
So, I’ve got this microphone,
08:13
which is going to be used for my voice.
08:17
I’ve got this touch panel right here with a UCI.
08:19
We’re going to use that to interact with my virtual page station,
08:22
and we’re going to use the physical page station every now and then as well,
08:25
so we can see how that works.
08:35
But wait, there’s more!
08:38
As you can tell by this indelicate insertion into the video,
08:41
there’s actually a newer version of a page station
08:45
that you can use that was not available when we
08:47
filmed the majority of the video,
08:49
but I want to make sure that you can see it.
08:51
And that is this one here.
08:52
This is new for us now,
08:54
but maybe not so new for you now watching this in the future.
08:57
This is the PSTS, a page station dock that uses a touchscreen embedded into it.
09:04
Essentially, this is a cradle that puts a touch
09:07
panel into it with a little magnetic seal,
09:10
and it’s got a microphone built in.
09:12
It’s got a button built in right here that gets connected
09:15
to the touchscreen via a little USB connection on the inside,
09:19
and that will sort of replace the physical page station that we saw previously.
09:25
This is, under the hood, just another virtual page station.
09:29
Realistically, it’s still a microphone in a dock and a touchscreen,
09:34
that’s all it is.
09:35
So, in the software,
09:36
you can add this by going to the Audio QAN section,
09:40
adding the PSTS from the Page Stations tab.
09:44
And here, once you have that and you add it into the design,
09:47
it just adds in like any other page station.
09:50
The physical component has the audio of the microphone
09:53
there and the control that comes in.
09:55
So, everything that you see for the rest of these videos
09:59
will be exactly as relevant for this device as it would be for this one.
10:03
Even though you’re still creating a virtual display on the touchscreen itself,
10:07
you are combining that with the physical controls.
10:10
So, it’s a little bit of this and that from the
10:11
physical page station and the virtual page station.
10:14
But I wanted to make sure you saw that.
10:16
It’s new, it’s cool, it’s the latest and greatest.
10:20
But for the rest of the videos,
10:22
I’ll be using the old physical page station because that’s what I had at the time.
10:25
All right, let’s get back to me.
10:30
First thing I want to do is actually make sure that my microphone is on.
10:33
I’m going to go to my mic line in,
10:36
turn on phantom power for this gooseneck.
10:38
I can see I’ve got a little LED on there now.
10:40
I probably need to raise up the preamp gain a little bit.
10:44
Check, check, check. This is my voice. All right, that looks pretty good.
10:47
Throughout the course of this, as I show you,
10:50
I’m going to use my hover monitor here in
10:52
Designer so that you can hear it from CUS itself.
10:55
So, I’m going to just maybe pin open this hover
10:58
monitor and unmute it so that when I do make an announcement,
11:02
we can see it comes out of there.
11:03
In fact, I can do that right now with my microphone.
11:06
Let’s double-check that my microphone is indeed working.
11:11
Hello, how are you?
11:12
Oh, indeed it worked.