Talkback Monitoring Question

[Siegfried Meier]

Hey guys,

I'm curious if anyone can sort out a talkback situation regarding the Central Station. We use a Behringer Powerplay ML 4 channel unit here, and we've recently been feeding 4 separate headphone mixes to it from a Digi 192. In our previous situation, we always just ran a 2 mix from the CS to the headphone amp, and talkback and the stereo music was fed to the band this way, with everyone getting the same mix. With more live off the floor tracking lately, we've needed to send separate headphone mixes, and this works via the Aux In on the unit, and sending 4 separate mixes. However, with this new way of doing things, I can no longer use the talkback section of the Central Station. What I would need is a physical talkback out of the CS, so I could feed it into an Aux of Pro Tools, and then off to each individual headphone mix, or into the main in of the headphone amp, and use the blend control between main in and aux in.

Currently, I've been putting up a mic when tracking and putting into an aux, but it's not as convenient or elegant as the talkback in the CS. Does anyone have any other suggestions for making this work?

Thanks!
Sig

[DrFord]

Correct me if I'm wrong but in the CS there's 2 modes for the Headphone outputs. One is monitor and the other is cue. Cue lets you use the talkback mode, monitor doesn't. As long as you are in Cue mode you should be fine, all you have to do is push the knob in and watch the light change to Cue.

Now if you are attempting to only talkback to say 1 band member at a time, instead of all members, well then you would need a better setup.

Are you using multiple outs from your converter to acheive seperate monitor mixes? As in 1-2 is your main, 3-4 is monitor mix 1, 5-6 is mix 2 etc.

If that is the way you should probably stay using a Mic on an Aux channel. A trick I saw on this forum before was to set a gate on the Aux chanel with a key input of either a track with a steady stream of audio during playback, or to put up a sinewave or whatnot for the entirety of the mix. Mute it, but have the send Pre_Fader. When you hit playback, the track won't sound, but it will start the gate's key input and shut down the talkback mic.

HTH

[Siegfried Meier]

Ya, I'm using 1-2 as the main outputs, and 9-16 for 4 stereo headphone mixes to 4 artists on the floor. I figured using the mic was really the only solution, and I had also heard about the gate trick. Only thing is they won't hear me if I try to stop them from doing a take, I'll have to signal them or run out there and tell them.

If I could rewire the CS and tap off a trace to give me Talkback mic out, then I could send that to the headphone amp as well. Need to look into this.

Thanks,
Sig