The mackie dl1608 white noise saga! (A new member, who has been a lurker)

[RoadRanger]

It's always in airplane mode since I removed the SIM card. Although I have to have WiFi enabled so that I can get my iPhone and iPad mini to wirelessly connect.

Removing the SIM has nothing to do with airplane mode, nor do you need the WiFi enabled on the docked iPad to allow another iPad or an iPhone to connect wirelessly to the router you plugged into the DL1608.

[Fluddman]

iBloke

Have you contacted the store you purchased from.

As this played up almost immediately they really should replace it or refund your money.

Don't wait too long otherwise they will only be obligated to repair it.

I really hope it works out for you.

Cheers

[iBloke]

It's always in airplane mode since I removed the SIM card. Although I have to have WiFi enabled so that I can get my iPhone and iPad mini to wirelessly connect.

Removing the SIM has nothing to do with airplane mode, nor do you need the WiFi enabled on the docked iPad to allow another iPad or an iPhone to connect wirelessly to the router you plugged into the DL1608.

Yes that's true. The docked iPad shouldn't need to have Wifi enabled to make it possible for other iPads/iPhones to connect wirelessly.

But the reality was that nothing else worked yesterday so I tried connecting the docked iPad to the wireless network. After doing that, my other ios devices were successful in also connecting wirelessly.

My suspicion is that my dlink router may have something to do with this. It's always been a stubborn bitch of a thing but at the time I bought it, it was the only option available to me to get internet to my shed which is about 50 metres from my house.
It is one of those routers that send and receive the www through the electrical wires. My shed has a sub board which connects to my house electricity supply so the internet travels through that.

I live way out in the sticks and my closest apple store, or apple products retailer are about 80 km away.
My plan is to purchase an apple airport express to use solely for the DL. I suspect it will work better than the dlink.

Oh and the only reason I have airplane mode enabled is because I like the picture of an airplane in the top left corner rather than "no SIM"
The SIM that used to live in the iPad 3 now lives in my iPad mini which goes everywhere with me.

[iBloke]

iBloke

Have you contacted the store you purchased from.

As this played up almost immediately they really should replace it or refund your money.

Don't wait too long otherwise they will only be obligated to repair it.

I really hope it works out for you.

Cheers

Not yet.

I have sent a bug report to mackie though.

The shop I bought the DL from has stores in Melbourne (110 km away) Perth, Sydney, and Adelaide.
My DL was sent from Adelaide (over 2000 km away) because none of the others had a 30 pin dock connector model. Only lightning.

I have to phone the Melbourne store today or tomorra to speak to the bloke who took my original order. He's been pretty cool to deal with it the past.

My iPad 3 has just finished restoring to factory specs and I've synced music accross, and downloaded the mackie app.

I'm about to try it in the DL again.

Before I did all that it only did the WN blast once today. It was playing music perfectly until I touched the "bass guitar" channel I have setup in a show for one of my regular bands.
As soon as I touched the graphic of the bass channel the white noise happened.
But then as soon as I exited the bass channel to hit the mute button on the iPad channel the white noise stopped by itself.

This thing has a mind of its own! 

[iBloke]

Just plugged my fully restored to new settings iPad 3

Loaded up the mackie app, started to music app, back to the mackie app and set iPad channel volume.

Once again as soon as I touched the settings graphic at the top of another channel the white noise started, but this time I had to force close the mackie app to make it stop.

There seems to be no consistency to the cause of the white noise blast.

Sending an email to StoreDJ now...

[iBloke]

I tried ringing the store, but they must be ultra busy coz nobody answered the phone.

So I've just sent an email off to Phill who is the bloke that took my original order.
My communications with him lead me to think of him as a decent bloke who I'd be happy to share a beer with.

This is the email I sent..

"G'day Phill.

I hate to have to do this but since receiving my new mackie I've had many many instances of the same problem.

The problem being a LOUD and continuous blast of white noise from the iPad channel while playing music from the docked iPad.

Google searches show that it is a well documented issue, however most of the people reporting the issue have it occur on rare occasions.
Mine has done it more times than I can count since receiving it.

Yes, I can plug an iPod into channels 15&16 and reliably supply "set break" music .. But that permanently takes up 2 channels effectively leaving me with a 14 channel mixer.
If mackie provide a dedicated iPad music playback channel that allows me to use all 16 XLR inputs then I expect it to work.

My 27 year reputation has been built on not only reliability of service, but also reliability of the gear I supply.
This mackie mixer is proving to not be something I can rely on, and has the potential to embarrass me.

If you have the time and interest you can follow this saga as it pans out on the cacophony Internet forum where I've been posting my findings. http://cacophony.aspinock.com/index.php?topic=687.msg6654#msg6654

I have already sent a "bug report" directly to mackie, but from what I understand they are already aware of this problem. Although I haven't found any reports of it happening as often as I've experienced it.

I apologised to you for my "burnt out old live sound engineer grumpiness", but this particular issue has me getting progressively more prickly, as you can probably understand.

I've spoken to you via email and on the phone and my impressions are that you're a pretty decent Bloke. I'd have a beer with you no problems

But right now I'm not sure how much more I can take of this particular problem, even though I can bypass it.
It's made me extremely uneasy about doing my first gig with it. I really don't have any faith in its overall reliability.

And the main reason for me buying it was to be able to leave my big heavy, and awkward analogue mixer and gear at home.
Now it looks like I'll need to bring that with me as well as the mackie, just in case the mackie shits in my face.

Regards

Phil

p.s. We have 3 iPads with 30 pin connectors. The white noise issue is there with all three so I'm convinced it's a mackie/apple software issue (?)


Sent from my iThingo"

[iBloke]

Mate here are some thoughts on your problem. Contact Ben Olswang at Mackie and offer your unit to his engineers since they seem to have difficulty reproducing the condition..

Ok so I've been trying to find an email contact for Ben but Google has found me nothing.

I've already sent a bug report to mackie, but it was directed at nobody in particular.

I'll try benolswang@mackie.com but after that I'm outa ideas..

[WK154]

ben.olswang@mackie.com should get his attention.

[sam.spoons]

I ran both iPads for 3-4 hours yesterday playing music through the iPad channel (iPad3/iOS6, iPad2/iOs7) with no sign of white noise or permanent loss of sync (either may have glitched out momentarily but without interrupting playback, I wasn't glued to the screen...). I've just updated the iPad2 to iOS7.1.2 and will run another test later though it will be unsupervised so will only show permanent white noise. If that's ok I'll try to induce the problem by playing with the GEQs and so on.

[RoadRanger]

Yours is a bit of a different setup than most all of us as you have an iPad with the cellular modem. Any chance of borrowing a WiFi-only iPad to see if the problem goes away? I still find it hard to believe that the noise isn't coming from the iPad...

[WK154]

The reason that the iPad is the least likely source of the white noise is that all the music docking stations would have similar problems, none are reported AFAIK. It's easy enough to test when the noise happens un-dock the iPad and listen. Does the local speaker have noise or music? Re-docking as I recollect does not switch back to the DL. Mackie engineering should have a USB packet sniffer as part of their setup and would easily be able to identify the problem and it's source. In my book the problem is with the DL.

[sam.spoons]

Ran the iPad2/iOS7.1.2 for several hours this arvo and played with MF PEQ and GEQ while playing, no problem.

[RoadRanger]

The path from the MP3 to the output of the DL is all digital - the only place I can think of where white noise is generated is in the MP3 decoder which is in the iPad. How could the DL possibly generate white noise unintentionally? But it's all idle speculation anyways LOL.

[WK154]

Who said anything about MP3 it could be any number of other formats that music player can handle. Yes it's a digital path to the DL via a pseudo USB path with hopefully CRC checks, but then it could be subjected to paths even through the DSP's and finally out to the D/A converter of the DL. Lots of places to go awry. We don't know the content of the noise, a recording of this might be quite informative.

[RoadRanger]

Who said anything about MP3 it could be any number of other formats that music player can handle.

Whatever, same diff unless it's a lossless format.

Yes it's a digital path to the DL via a pseudo USB path with hopefully CRC checks, but then it could be subjected to paths even through the DSP's and finally out to the D/A converter of the DL. Lots of places to go awry.

But not generate white noise - that's a very specific thing. Not something that digital stuff does naturally. The decoders for compressed formats DO generate white noise to "fill in" missing/lost high frequency content.