X32 Firmware V4 | 102 - Rear Connections

hi guys is Drew brashley with DBB audio I'm continuing my new version for series on the behringer x32 and today we're gonna be talking about the physical inputs and outputs of the board and just really how to get an XLR with a microphone plugged into your board and passing audio so let's go ahead and jump in the behringer x32 is a 40 input console now you're probably thinking how is that possible there's only 32 inputs on the back of the board well there's 32 XLR inputs and then there's an additional six auxilary inputs that are quarter-inch TRS or TS balanced or unbalanced line level inputs now that's a lot to say so let's go ahead and just dive in and take a look at them so I have a camera set up here at the back of the board with my XLR inputs followed by the auxiliary inputs and then also auxilary outputs down on the bottom so we have these six channels and these are quarter-inch inputs now this is a balanced TRS signal but it can also accept an unbalanced TS signal now I would not suggest plugging in an acoustic guitar these because these do require a line level signal now over here we have these RCA inputs which is very helpful if we're ever wanting to plug in an iPod and so what I will do is I will grab a 1/8 inch stereo 2a RCA stereo and plug this into the back of the board plug this into my iPod and now I have my iPod hooked into my console landing here on my auxilary ends on 5 and 6 I will go ahead and link these two and that is my iPod input that I always use every time I use the behringer x32 if you are wanting to plug in an acoustic guitar or a bass guitar into this console the auxiliary inputs are not going to be the way that you'll want to plug it in the reasoning for that is the auxiliary inputs are a line level only signal and so if you take a an acoustic guitar or a bass guitar those pickups are going to want a high impedance load and these line level inputs will give a lower impedance load of about 20,000 ohms and that's going to cause your acoustic guitar or your bass guitar or electric guitar basically anything that has a pickup in it and it's actually going to change the tonality of that instrument in a very bad way so what you'll need to do is you'll need to get a direct box now a direct box there's a couple different types there's an active and passive and there's a bunch of different ones out there and I will make sure to post on my blog debut via audio comm a couple ones that I recommend I have a very beat-up old direct box here this is a whirlwind director direct box and this is a passive direct box which means passive means there is a transformer inside of this VI box that will take the high impedance of your acoustic and turn it into a low impedance output that will then go and plug into your XLR inputs on the board now there's also active which means that there's going to be active circuitry inside of this di box which will require phantom power or a battery inside of the DI box to actually do that transfer of the hiden pians load to the low impedance load alright so how do we get this to work well let's go ahead and plug it in so we grab our quarter inch from our acoustic guitar and plug it into the input of the Dei box one benefit of a DI box is it has this really cool function of a ground lift switch so if you do have an instrument for instance a keyboard that when you plug it into your PA system and through your soundboard it gives this hum well a direct box is going to allow you to break that ground loop hum in a very safe way never ever try to fix a ground loop using a ground lift off of the actual plug of the electricity it's very dangerous and you can actually cause someone to die because of it so always use e a DI box for lifting the ground of an instrument that has a ground loop problem so grab your instrument plug it into the input and then grab an XLR cable plug one end into the output of your direct box and then that will then plug in two for today input one on the back of our board and because this is a passive direct box does not need phantom power but let's go ahead and do the tap test so I'm gonna go ahead and select my channel one I am going to turn up the gain on it and I'm just going to tap on the end of this and we can see that there is signal there so that is how we would plug in an acoustic guitar a keyboard bass guitar or any other unbalanced quarter-inch instrument that you want to plug into your console now what about a microphone well microphones they are XLR based so we're just going to grab a microphone plug it into an XLR and plug it into the back of our console now if your microphone needs phantom power then you would need to go ahead and turn on phantom power and we can do that by selecting our channel pressing view on that channel and then pressing 48 volts in the upper left-hand corner of the board do not turn on phantom power for microphones that do not need it there are transformers and most microphones to block that DC power from damaging the element of the microphone however there are some old microphones for instance ribbon microphones where if you did apply phantom power you can actually destroy the microphone we don't want to do that so only turn on phantom power for the channels that need it most of the that's going to be small diaphragm condensers large diaphragm two condensers or any active circuitry requiring phantom power like a DI box so we can go ahead and plug in our microphone check check check and we can see that oh my gains a little bit too high so I'm going to go ahead and turn my game down so I'm going to go ahead and select my channel press view on the configuration preamp spot and then turn my gain down so that when my average volume of me talking to this is hovering right around the negative 18 light which would be the first yellow light in this meter and then what this gives me is this gives me a lot of headroom is what we call it which is the amount of room between your signal and the clip now clip what happens if we distort our board and clipping sounds like distortion distortions bad it can damage your speaker's if you have too much of it and it's just not very pleasant so we want to make sure that we have a lot of headroom in case a musician all of a sudden speaks very loudly into this microphone like shouting then we aren't clipping that channel now what if we have our behringer x32 sitting at front of house and our stage is all the way up a couple hundred feet away from us and we're wanting to plug in a whole bunch of microphones up on that stage well that's where a remote input box like the mydas dl 32 or the behringer s 32 would come in handy using a very cool thing called aes 50 so let's go ahead and start talking about that next AES 50 is what behringer x32 and the mydas family of the M 32 uses to talk to its remote stage boxes it is a digital audio protocol that is 48 channels bi-directional which means I can send 48 channels in and 48 channels out over the same cable which is very cool it's owned by clark technic and it's also called Super Mac now the audio is carried over a shielded cat5e or better cable now by shielded that means that the cable has a shield that is running over the entire length of that network cable and cat5e is going to be the category rating or speed of that network cable now you can use a cat 6 or higher cable but it just has to be shielded it really needs to be shielded and it is recommended to have the ether con barrel on the end for stability robustness and for a little bit better shield over your connection of your digital protocol now this cable can connect to your remote stage box a hundred meters away or a little bit over 300 feet if you do need to go farther than that you can use another AES 50 device to then take it as an input and then take that output out of the AES device and send it even farther so for instance if we had this room at stage box 200 meters away from us we could take this stage box place it on this stage put an X 32 in the middle have one AES 50 cable coming from that stage box into the first X 32 and then take another a s 50 and plug it into our front of house con so another hundred meters away and give us that 200 meters total in distance now that's not very practical so I would recommend trying to keep that distance fairly low so let's go ahead and plug in this stage box into our X 32 went ahead and plugged in one side of the ether con cable into the a port of the AES 50 on this DL 32 X time going to take this and plug it into the a port on my console and that's it now we just have to do a little bit of routing inside of the menu structure of our X 32 we can do that in our routing tab so that is your third button down we'll go ahead and press routing and all of the input blocks here are currently on local by default your behringer x32 when you first initialize it will have it on local now local stands for the local inputs on the actual physical surface of your X 32 being the local inputs on the back of the board anything else can be selected via our routing blocks now this stage box is being plugged into our AES 50 a port on this console which means that I need to route all of my inputs from AES 50 a 1 through 32 because there's 32 channels and I'm wanting to route all 32 channels well what if I only want to route 16 well then only select 16 of those channels and then you can use the rest of the 16 in a different area well what if I only want to have one locally and 31 on mice promote stage-box well you'll have to wait for that next video that's gonna be on the user routing which gives us one-to-one patching which means that I can take 31 inputs from this remote stage box and a single input from here and have all of them coming into my console now that's one of the great features of this version 4 firmware for the X 32 previous versions of the firmware say one two or three would only allow you to take blocks of 8 which means that I could take 8 16 24 or 32 inputs from this and I would have to choose which ones I'm not going to accept on the board so let's go ahead and route all of our audio inputs AES 58 so to do that I'm going to press routing tab over to input and I'm going to go select AES 50 a 1 through 8 9 through 16 17 through 24 25 through 32 now if I am wanting to record these channels on my expansion card with a computer plugged into the USB I need to do another set of routing because all my inputs are now coming from this stage box and not from the local inputs but if we tab over to our card what we'll notice is that all of these are still being sourced from our local inputs so this is a big mistake that I see a lot of churches accidentally doing is they have their stage box sitting up on stage and they're going and they want to do a multitrack recording and they hit record and then they have nothing except blank audio and that's because they're trying to record their local channels instead of their remote stage box so let's go ahead and tab over to card and we're going to set this to AES 50 a 1 through 8 9 through 16 17 through 24 25 through 32 now if you did plug in your remote stage box into your B port you would want to select your B port for this if you had one s 16 plugged into your a port and another s 16 plugged into your B port you'd want to select 1 through 16 on both ports meaning that I would go ahead and select a es 50 a at 1 through 16 and then a s 50 B 1 through 16 now that's not the case for us here as I have a dl 32 which gives us all 32 inputs over that AES 15 so we're going to go back to 17 through 24 25 through 32 and now I'm ready to plug in an input so let's go ahead and plug in an input into input 1 here so I have my microphone and an XLR gonna plug it into input 1 and I'm gonna go select my input 1 here press view I can see that it's being routed from a 0 1 which means that's AES 50 a port 1 and I can start talking into this microphone and then I can go ahead and play a some more gain and get it up to that negative 18 sweet spot hey check check check awesome now we have our and put routed now I can go ahead and plug in an input into 16 here and same thing a 16 is right there and let's apply a little bit of gain here check check check perfect that's as simple as it is to get inputs from a remote stage box into our console let's go ahead and start talking about outputs next the behringer x32 has 16 XLR outputs on the back of the physical board that's going to be the full-size any of the smaller sizes of the console for instance the producer or the compact are gonna have eight XLR outputs all versions of the x32 also have an additional aux outputs of six which are going to be the TRS or TS balanced or unbalanced quarter-inch outputs let's go ahead and take a look at the XLR first so we can see here on this camera shot that I have my XLR outputs one through eight and nine through sixteen now by default 15 and 16 are going to be your left and right output out of the board if you have a smaller version of the board for instance the compact of the producer seven and eight is going to be by default set as your left-right output now one mistake I unfortunately see a lot of people doing is plugging in their main PA into their control room or monitor output of the board and what will happen is when you go and solo a channel it will actually solo it in your house because you have your entire house PA plugged into your control room output now this is an incorrect way of doing that you want to use the seven and eight if you have a smaller version of the board or the 15 and 16 on the full size of the board for sending out your main PA to your left right the control room monitor output is strictly for a near-field set of monitors that you're wanting to listen to that you can solo up an input and listen to those in those speakers now additionally the monitors will show up on the headphone outputs which happen to be in the handles of the x32 and we do have our monitor level which controls the volume output out of this control room out in the upper right hand corner of the board additionally the phone's level which will control the volume of the headphones on the sides if you're wanting to route something to one of these XLR outputs on the local portion of the board all you have to do is simply tab over page over until you get to your patch points now we have analog outputs 1 through 16 and we can go ahead and use our rotary knob and select an output so for instance if I was wanting to place my left right output on 4 & 5 all we would do is scroll to output 4 and then I would go and select it in this out signal so main left and I would assign and I want that to be post fader so that it can control the volume of the output and then let's go ahead and set 5 to being our main right and post fader Oh actually accidentally set that up wrong I have 4 & 5 as my output monitors on my mix buss 1 & 2 so let's go ahead and route those real quick so we'll go back to output 4 and this is actually a mix buss 1 and I want that on post fader so I can have control over that volume and output 5 is supposed to be mixed bus 2 you can see that it's very simple to place these outputs but what if we wanted to have these outputs show up on our DL 32 that's sitting up on the stage well we can set that by setting our outputs 1 through 16 here and then we can tab over to our AES 50a which is where we have our DL 32 plugged in on the console and then outputs 1 through 16 the first set here is going to be what shows up on our outputs of the DL 32 so if I wanted to have my outputs 1 through 16 showing up on the DL 32 I would want to have outputs 1 through 8 and 9 through 16 selected on my first 16 channels of that AES 50a outputs because this is an output portion of the board going over that ether con connection to my stage box so remember that 48 in 48 out well this is our 48 channels out of our console going to our DL 32 another very popular thing is using the alternate output now the ultra net output is on the back of the x32 as well as the back of the dl 32 or any of the remote stage boxes and this allows you to interface with the behringer p16 monitoring system which is a personal monitoring system which allows the musician to mix their own mix now let's go ahead and set up our outputs from the board to go ahead and feed that we can do that by pressing routing and then Pat tabbing over until we get to P 16 now we can see P 16 one output and I can start pulling this from either direct out of channels or I could even pull this off of mix buses and there's a lot of different tap points here as well so I can choose pre EQ if I was wanting to have everything be before the EQ or I can choose post B EQ or pre fader there's a lot of different tap options and if you do have any questions on how those actually route to this with those different taps you go ahead and check out my blog I have a blog post on there at dbb audio comm that you can check out and read all about that now one thing that we do need to make sure of is in our routing on the AES 50 a page is that our patch points on the outputs of 33 through 48 are being sourced from p 16 1 through 16 if this is set to anything else your P 16 monitoring system that you plug in on the ultra net on the stage rack is going to be not what you expect it to be if you had for instance card output 1 through 8 and output 9 through 16 well now on your P 16 monitoring system your outputs 1 through 16 are going to be showing up there instead of the ultra net let's talk about the remaining connections on the back of the x32 the first thing that we're going to talk about is the expansion card riches right here now most behringer x32 is shipped with the either the Xu F or the X USB card inserted on the x32 the Xu F is going to be a firewire or USB 32 and 32 out expansion card which means that all my 32 inputs and 32 outputs can be routed through that card into a laptop via the USB the XE USB is going to be a USB interface only and then there's this really cool card which I actually have inserted on my Exeter - called the X live which allows me to record 32 channels to an SD card locally on this console and then I can actually play those 32 channels back into my console if I want to do a virtual soundcheck for instance or if you were wanting to just have that backup of having a really robust recording of 32 channels going into that SD card there is also a USB connection on that which means that I can record those 32 channels additionally to a laptops and now I have a robust recording on the SD card as well as a backup on the laptop now there are a bunch of different types of expansion cards available for the x3 - including Dante waves integrations Madi cards I actually have a blog post dedicated to all the expansion cards that are available on the market for the x3 - which you can check out at my blog the next thing you'll see here is the remote portion now there's a USB that is not used anymore and then there's also a Ethernet connection which allows us to remote connect into this console using the software available for your computer or even an iPad or a tablet now you will need to do some networking on your console but I actually have a blog post dedicated that on my blog so go check that out as well now you can see the next thing that we have is our MIDI in and out and then we have our aes/ebu output as well as our ultra net output the very last thing that we have on the back of the board which is a very long reach from here is our auxiliary outputs now the auxiliary outputs are gonna be six quarter inch TRS or TS if you want the unbalanced and those are there for you as well as two RCA outputs now the RCA jacks I love to plug into a camera if we have a camera that needs to have a little bit of recording or plug it into a CD recorder or another type of recording device now if you are wanting to route Audio to that that isn't a completely separate portion than the outputs one through sixteen and allows you to send dedicated to outputs to that so let's go ahead and check that out real quick go ahead and press routing page over to patch points and locate your aux and we can see that we have aux one through six as well as our aes/ebu left and right and that brings us to the conclusion of the video on the connections of the x32 as you can tell there's a lot of input and output options available for this console so if you do find yourself in a little bit of confusion feel free to jump over to my blog as I have a blog post dedicated to the input and output options available for the x32 make sure to LIKE or subscribe this video and my channel and if you have any questions feel free to post below but thank you so much for watching and I will be releasing a whole bunch of more videos on the version 4 firmware update that behringer released for this x32 thank you so much

Channel: Drew Brashler

Views: 33,491

Keywords: Behringer, Behringer X32, X32, Midas M32, M32, Midas, Behringer X32 Inputs, Behringer X32 Outputs, Behringer X32 XLR, X32 Inputs, X32 Outputs, X32 XLR, Behringer X32 Rear Connections, Behringer X32 Rear, X32 Rear Connections, X32 Rear, X32 Rear Inputs, X32 DI Box, X32 Guitar, Behringer X32 Guitar, Behringer X32 Bass, Behringer X32 DI Box

Id: czKgBK74fsM

Length: 23min 19sec (1399 seconds)

Published: Sat May 02 2020