Some Faders or Buttons Randomly Loose Connection

[Barry Johns]

I have a Fader Pack, An Edit Pack, and a Main Unit Procontrol.

Occasionally the following occurs, if I turn the power off and back on, all units work perfectly.

Fader stops responding, moving the physical fader, or the DAW fader causes neither to respond. If I nudge, the new fader works perfectly so it is attributed to that fader. However, it does not consistently happen with the same fader, it can be random. Again, power off, then back on, all works perfectly.

The same happens with insert buttons not he fader pack, never on the main unit. So lets say I select eq on a channel, it should bring up any eq plugin on that channel. It will work perfectly on channels on the main unit, but none of the Fader Packs channel strips respond, acts like its just locked up. Again, powering down and back on solves the issue. This issue does not happen at the same frequency as the problem above, actually last night was the first time.

All units are connect to a Ethernet Hub, main unit connected via cross over cable, others a regular cat 45 cable.

Hub connect directly to the MacPro.

Any ideas?

[Delta Music Belgium]

Why do you use a cross over cable for the ProControl Main Unit? This is not correct.

All cables from all ProControl units to the ethernet hub and from the ethernet hub to the Mac should be standard CAT 4, 5 or 6 patch cables. Only if you connect one Main Unit directly to the Mac you should use a cross over cable. This is explained in the manual of the ProControl Main Unit.

My 48 channel ProControl uses only standard CAT 5 patch cables and works like a charm!

So maybe changing that one cross over cable to a standard patch cable could solve the problem.

If this does not help I would start with re-seating all CAT cables...

Then I would start to swap CAT cables...

Then I would replace all CAT cables...

Then I would try a new Ethernet hub...

If nothing of the above helps then I'm afraid it's time to start opening some ProControl units...

Please feel free to contact me privately if you would get to this stage, maybe I will be able to guide and help you (I know my machines inside and out)