Low signal problem?? Studio Live 16r

[eddsaffell]

I’ve had the Presonus studio/live in my rack for mixing IEMs for the last year and it’s been fine for changing volumes, but using it as a FOH mixing desk seems impossible. Even with 30db of gain on a microphone it doesn’t seem to hit the compressor or eq properly, it seems there’s barely any signal on the processing. Which makes it really difficult to use. Any advice on this would be great thanks. Its firmware is fully updated.

 

[Gerran]

I'm guessing gain staging is the solution for this. Do you use the compressors for the IEM busses? Do they work as expected over there?
Especially dynamic microphones tend to need a fair amount of PreAmp volume. I have no direct comparison in front of me, but scrolling through some old scenes on my mixer, 46dB preAmp gain is no exception.
You want your input level nice and hot for the FAT channel processing to be able to work with the signal. Off course it shouldn't clip, but below -24dB is just for the quiet stuff and won't be affected much by the FAT channel...

 

[eddsaffell]

I'm guessing gain staging is the solution for this. Do you use the compressors for the IEM busses? Do they work as expected over there?
Especially dynamic microphones tend to need a fair amount of PreAmp volume. I have no direct comparison in front of me, but scrolling through some old scenes on my mixer, 46dB preAmp gain is no exception.
You want your input level nice and hot for the FAT channel processing to be able to work with the signal. Off course it shouldn't clip, but below -24dB is just for the quiet stuff and won't be affected much by the FAT channel...

If a vocal mic is getting 30+ db of gain I’ll be running into peaking/distortion territory. It seems to be just the processing (comp,eq etc) that only seems to be picking up really small amount of signal making them practically unusable

 

[Gerran]

Well, I don't know what else it could be. Looking at you picture, the "tracks" channel at this particular point in time doesn't have a lot of input gain for the FAT channel to work with, but that's about all I can tell. Wish I could be of more help..

 

[SwitchBack]

I've never had mic gain or compressor input level issues with Series III mixers, so there's something else going on.

The picture doesn't give much info either, showing the EQ rather than the compressor for the selected channel (a stereo-linked input for a laptop?), so I can't see what sort of settings for ratio, attack and release you're using, or which compressor is used for that matter. All I can see is that some sort of gain reduction/limiting is happening.

For the mic inputs (one wireless and one wired?) there seems to be no input level at all but there can be a handful of reasons for that. Now you have the noise gate/expander kicking in. Meter levels about half way to 3/4 way up the input meter scales is good. Maybe you can provide more info and a few more pictures for more specific advice.

As for the RTA graphics that's an old gripe of mine. They don't auto-scale so for low level inputs they hardly break the surface, which makes them a lot less useful than what it could be. Alas.