MAGFest was approaching and I found a sweet deal on a few QSC BASiS units. For the record, I love QSC hardware. I’ve owned a few Digital Cinema amplifiers for many years, as well as a CX series. My goal back then was to have the THX cinema certified amplifiers for my home theater, and at the time people weren’t so aware of eBay. The amplifiers did suffer an issue or two which I suppose can be the subject of another post. There is a service bulletin.
But back to the BASiS units. I was after some QSC units from their RAVE series that use an older standard called CobraNet. CobraNet does UDP broadcasts of audio packets, raw PCM uncompressed. The RAVE units that do analog tend to catch quite a bit more, but I stumbled onto the BASIS units which are meant to hook straight to the QSC amplifier dataports. The dataports are DB-HD-15 (think VGA) connectors that hook to management processors. Note – Don’t use a common VGA cable, all pins must be wired straight through and many VGA cables share grounds among a number of pins.
Doing some research online I found there is no issue making breakouts that go from DB-HD-15 to XLR or RCA, and QSC even sells a breakout board with screw terminals. Sweet!
The bad news? Didn’t get the network working enough in the MAGFest arcade in 2017 to get it working. Next event, and in the meantime I will use my BASIS boxes with my amps to run audio around the house. Once the network is segmented so that the broadcast traffic from the audio doesn’t cause the WiFi to fall over….
