This weekend I had a party with a guest DJ that brought their own gear (XDJ-1000 mk2 + DJM A9). The master out from the A9 was connected to my Prime 4+'s channel 3 (set as Line In, not Phono).
We played the whole party on the Prime 4+, for about 4.5 hours, without any issues, however when we switched to the guest DJ, using the Line In, after a few minutes we started to notice some audio glitches, the sound was cutting for a few milliseconds at random. It started happening rarely but later it was unbearable.
Here is a snippet from the recoding made internally by the Prime 4+, a little bit before the problem became completely unbearable, at which point we decided to connect the A9 directly to the venue’s mixer:
I had a separate recorder as a backup connected to the booth out and the same issues happened there, so it’s not something on the master out RCA.
After connecting the A9 to the venue’s mixer the problem was solved, so it’s something related to the Prime 4.
What could be the issue? Is the Prime 4 defective? What tests could I perform to identify such issues? Are there limitations to these inputs that I’m not aware of?
I’m totally lost, never saw anything like this, so I don’t even know how to begin troubleshooting. Please let me know what other info could be useful to solve this mystery.
Hola, habrĂa que hacer pruebas pero me da la sensaciĂłn de que hubiese un nivel muy alto de señal de entrada en el Prime 4, yo empezarĂa por ahĂ, un saludo.
That was my first guess too, because the trim on channel 3 was indeed a bit high (it was on 3 o’clock with some EQ slightly increased too, maybe at 2 o’clock), but there was no clipping at the party or in the recording (either perceived nor in the meters) on any of the devices, the audio was simply cutting, without the characteristic distortion from clipping, almost like a Trans/Flex Gate effect.
Another hypothesis I had was that the play time had an effect. So I tested just now, I connected an FLX10 into channel 3, set all knobs to the maximum on both devices (trim, EQ and master out) letting it clip and disabled all limiters on the FLX10 to send the loudest signal possible to the Prime 4. I let it play for about 4h.
Still I couldn’t reproduce the issue at all. I just get the normal distorted sound from clipping, but no cutting out like in the recording I attached.
I might try to get in touch with the other DJ to see if I can borrow the DJM A9 to run some tests to figure out what went wrong and how to avoid it (other than the easy and expensive “buy other/more gear” answer I often get from people but it’s not an option for the foreseeable future ).
).