Room Combine question

prosndinc

I've not used room combining a lot but I have an application now where it may or may not be the answer,
I have an retirement community with a auditorium with 2 air walls so the room can be cut into 3 smaller rooms. The resulting room is a fan shape with essentially a Left room, Center room and Right room. There are 12 wireless mics along with 1 DVD, 1 Cable box and 1 CD player. The customer wants to use any mic in any room. My first thought is to use 3 auto mixers for the 12 mics one for each room with the DVD, Cable, CD processed as BGM sources in the room combine module. I could provide a custom control panel for each room with volume controls and mute buttons for each mic, this will allow them to select or de select mic's for each room. My concern is what will happen if one or both of the air walls are open and one or many mics are selected in multiple rooms? Will the auto mix functions be corrupted (gain sharing) if the same source is effectively inputed on multiple mixers?
Would I be better off If I skipped the room combine module and just selectively muted auto mixer main outs when walls are open. I could see a scenario working where I mute the left or right mixer or both if the wall to that room was open and then re route the center room mixer output to the other room that now has a muted mixer.

Sorry for the long question, what are the groups thoughts on this? I'm open to suggestions and I must get it right the first time.

Thanks
Charlie

kevinzz

Create an automixer for each partition, that has inputs for every mic in the system. Do not let a single mic be active to two mixers at the same time. Create a user control to allow each mic to be routed to only one of the partitions at a time. When the partitions are open, it won't matter which mixer they are attached to.

Controlling this with presets can be somewhat tedious. I would try doing it with logic. For each mic (say mic 2), create a Logic Source for each of the partitions it can be assigned to (3 in your case, no?). Link these three Logic Source buttons using a Radio link, so only one can be on at a time. Connect each logic source through a NOT to a Logic End. Link the Logic End to a channel mute of your automixer feeding each room. (channel 2 on each of your three automixers) That will force only one of the mutes to be off at a time. Bonus is that you can use the Logic Source as the user feedback, no additional logic required.

Use the version of the automixer that has the master/slave functionality and connect it to the Room Combiner as shown in the help file. This will keep the 'rules' of the mixer consistent i.e. if your NOM limit is 2 mics at a time, it doesn't matter how many mixers are connected together 'through' the room combiner.

The help file for gated automixer explains this pretty well. you could also use a Gain sharing automixer, but its benefits when using it with wireless mics is not significant IMHO. I like that you can really see and tweak the channel behavior with the gated automixer.

You are on track with the BGM sources. Let the room combiner handle that, it does it very well.

Keep in mind that when you combine two rooms, the automixer will link the volume controls together and push the higher one to the lower level. When uncombining, the controls stay at the level, they do not revert. Sometimes if a volume control is left all the way down, combining the rooms may have the unexpected affect of turning something 'off' because one of the partitions had a control down.

Good luck!

prosndinc

Thanks for the reply. I got some assistance from Will at BSS who suggested I put the mic's on a Matrix 12 mic in x 36 out (3x 12 automixers). I dragged a button onto a control panel for each mic x 3 outputs and radio linked them so each mic could only be assigned to a single auto mixer. As you say when the rooms walls are open it doesn't matter which mixer the mic is on due to auto mixer linking in the room combine object. The system works well and the customer found it very intuitive.

Cheers

Charlie