Help required to play through a Bar's soundsystem

You say that when “singers” come in, they plug in directly to the XLR input? With what, microphones?

Cause if those are mic inputs then it could be that what you hear as a whisper is actually the sound cut back through the limiter as you have redlined the mic inputs by putting your line level signal in there. Having said that, those mic inputs need to go into some kind of mixer as well. You can’t drive an amp with just a mic input.

So the whole setup sounds a bit sketchy.

Since you have access to the sound engineer, I’d suggest you get together with him at some day other than gig night and spend an hour figuring out the system. I can vouch for the fact that if you use the XLR outputs from the Denon MC6000 the signal will be clear and strong and should not present a problem. I won’t insult you by asking if you have checked all the relevant levels (everything at 12 o’clock – including filter) and ran a 0dB path check before turning up the master volume.

When you hooked up to the bar mixer, where you also going XLR to XLR or was that the RCA outputs?

Hi Mat, while useful in a general sense, he is going into XLR in the wall. VERY unlikely that those balanced inputs are hooked up to phono inputs, but even if they are, it would sound a bit funky and loud, but it should actually play. Then again, this could trigger the limiters as well. Since we don’t know the exact setup (including signal path) it’s hard to say what’s going on.

Bringing his own mixer won’t help. He would have to hook up that mixer to the same XLRs and that output signal will be identical in level to what the Denon puts out.

One thing he could try is to run XLR to XLR cable straight into the limiter inputs (most likely XLR as well), thus bypassing everything.

Nope, the Denon is blazing away at +4dBu as per specification. Totally pro signal(level).

When you say phono out from the Denon I am gonna assume you mean the red/white RCAs. If you go from those (unbalanced) outputs to the (balanced) inputs on the mixer, you introduce a bit of a mismatch (in both signal level and load impedance – which is for another time). This can definitely have a lower input signal at the mixer end, as a result you running your controller hotter than usual.

Depending on the PA mixer, the channel you plug into (big jacks) should have a channel gain. With your Denon supplying 0dB input to the mixer, use the channel gain to get 0dB channel level on the mixer. Now open the channel fader on the mixer to the desired level (full open is 0dB to the master). At this point, your mixer is able to push 0dB to the limiter/amp.

However, this still doesn’t solve the puzzle why if you take out the mixer and stick your denon XLR outputs straight into the same connections that the mixer out normally uses, you get such a low level sound. THAT does not make sense.
Because the mixer would normally output the same level as your Denon. i.e. you should have the sound level you need. There wouldn’t be any need to bypass the limiter either.

Just a thought – could it be that the XLR’s on the wall are wired up wrong? Or wired up as an unbalanced connection despite being XLR? If so, do you have any adaptors that you could use to input an unbalanced signal into the sockets? EG going from the RCAs on the back of your denon through an adaptor to then output XLR??

This is the only thing that I can think of that it might be as the small PA mixer the singers used could well have been outputting unbalanced (Esp. if it was a smaller mixer – it’s quite hard to find a small mixer with proper balanced outputs these days..)

It could be complete nonsense.. on the other hand it may work.. Worth a shot??

bob6397

LOL, thanks for that vote of confidence, appreciate it!