Monitoring with Xenyx Q502USB

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MysticDaedra

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I've searched everywhere, but I can't seem to find any info on this. Hopefully someone here can help me.

I have a Behringer Xenyx Q502USB with a Shure SM-57 connected to my PC, running Audacity. When the "To Phones" and "To Main Mix" buttons are both not pressed, I can hear my voice when I sing into the mic. When I press "To Phones" I can't hear anything from the mic, just what is coming through the USB cable into the interface from the PC. When I press "To Main Mix" I can hear my voice and the music from the PC, but if I record at the same time it records the output from the PC as well as the input from the mic.

So... Am I doing something horribly wrong, or is this all exactly how the 502USB is supposed to work? What I want is to be able to hear my voice and the track from the PC at the same time through my headphones, but only record my voice.

Thanks for the help.
 
MysticDaedra said:
I've searched everywhere, but I can't seem to find any info on this. Hopefully someone here can help me.

I have a Behringer Xenyx Q502USB with a Shure SM-57 connected to my PC, running Audacity. When the "To Phones" and "To Main Mix" buttons are both not pressed, I can hear my voice when I sing into the mic. When I press "To Phones" I can't hear anything from the mic, just what is coming through the USB cable into the interface from the PC. When I press "To Main Mix" I can hear my voice and the music from the PC, but if I record at the same time it records the output from the PC as well as the input from the mic.

So... Am I doing something horribly wrong, or is this all exactly how the 502USB is supposed to work? What I want is to be able to hear my voice and the track from the PC at the same time through my headphones, but only record my voice.

Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

I don't think you can? There might be a combination of the 502 monitoring switching and the setup in Audacity (go, Edit> Preferences, and see record/play options) but I think the mixer is really only designed to record a stereo stream and not be part of a track building system.

Might be time to consider a "proper" audio interface such as the Steinberg UR22? But keep the Berry! There is little so handy in a projjy "stoodio" than a wee mixer!

Dave.
 
Maybe try playing the PC track from a MP3 player into the 2track in jacks. The Headphones send button works on that input also. Maybe that will seperate it from the USB record stream. I don't know if this will work for your recording purposes though.
 
ecc83 said:
I don't think you can? There might be a combination of the 502 monitoring switching and the setup in Audacity (go, Edit> Preferences, and see record/play options) but I think the mixer is really only designed to record a stereo stream and not be part of a track building system.

Might be time to consider a "proper" audio interface such as the Steinberg UR22? But keep the Berry! There is little so handy in a projjy "stoodio" than a wee mixer!

Dave.
Click to expand...

Hmm, sounds like I may have got the wrong interface for what I'm trying to accomplish. Thanks for clearing this up for me though, I honestly was quite confused when I was working with the mixer.

I managed to play the audio stream through a different device, which allowed me to hear my voice and the audio at the same time, although not through the same headset.
 
The 'To Phones' and 'To Main Mix' buttons are for the USB-to-mixer feed. Now you see the problem with using an inexpensive mixer as an audio interface. Read this excellent thread about mixers and home recording.
 
I am usually a defender of the Xenyx series of mixers... I use a 1202 in my home studio, without the USB, but I've read the manuals and answered questions about most of them. When I saw your question I was fairly confident it was just a matter of the right combination of switch settings to do what you're trying to do... which is THE very thing that ANY audio device with a USB connection should be able to do... BUT... from what I'm reading about the Q502USB... for reasons I can't imagine, the engineers at Behringer must have taken the day off and left the design work to the weekend night shift janitor. There is NO EXCUSE for the patching behaviour of your mixer. The ONLY thing I can think of is that the weekend night janitor presumed you'd do your monitoring in the software. I'm not sure whether Audacity supports this or not. I know that Reaper does, although I've never needed to use it. Read up on Audacity's monitoring capability. It may let you do what you are wanting to do, if your computer is fast enough.

In case none of what I'm saying makes any sense.... With hardware monitoring (which you were expecting), you push the right set of buttons, and the phones get the sum of the inputs to the mixer/interface and the USB signal from the computer. What you hear in the phones is real time because it's all a direct analog connection between the inputs and your headphones. A properly designed interface will send the inputs to the computer by USB, but not the USB signal it's receiving from the computer, because that would make a feedback loop, and all is good.

With software monitoring, on the other hand (which the weekend night janitor at Behringer had in mind), you push the right set of buttons, and the mixer sends the inputs to the computer and sends whatever the computer sends to the headphones. In order to "play along with the track", which we ALL want to do, the software has to do the work. It has to grab your incoming signal for what you are playing, add it to the queue material (previously recorded tracks, karoake backing track, whatever) and send that combined signal to the mixer for you to hear in your headphones. The problem with this is that the computer has to have what you are playing, to combine with what you are going to hear before you hear it! You can't very well "play along" if you have to play it before you hear it!!!. Now if the computer is REALLY fast, what you'll hear is what you played just a few milliseconds or so ago, which will sound fine as you're playing along. This delay is called latency, and it's the reason software monitoring is an inherently flawed idea, and why Behringer doesn't normally let the weekend night janitor do their design work.

I exaggerate, of course... if you have a modern, reasonably fast computer, check the Audacity help for info about monitoring. It probably has this capability, and when you click the right button in the software, it will do just what you want to do, with a teeeny little delay that you probably won't notice. If Audacity won't do it, download Reaper. It definitely does have sofwater monitoring capability, and it's quite inexpensive (and totally "try before you buy"!!!). In my experience Reaper runs circles around Audacity, although in fairness I haven't used Audacity in at least 8-10 years. It could be a lot more today than it was when I last played with it....

Hope this helps!

J
 
Yes J, it does seem a design flaw. Your point about latency is well taken but it would not matter if the computer had an impossible one microsecond of latency! The bottleneck is almost always at the interface and the driver. I can see no way that Berry will be fast enough and without ASIO drivers the OP is sunk.

Another "janitorial" flaw in many small mixers is the absence of independent monitor and headphone control which means it is impossible to use a live mic and cans because you cannot turn the speakers off!

Dave.
 
The Mackie ProFX series has better monitoring options (but still suffers the typical USB mixer A-to-D high pitched frequency when turned up too loud) - seperate monitor fader and headphone volume control - but no way to switch the headphones from main mix to monitor mix.
Two things I found annoying just the other night with the Mackie, the first time I actually used it for a live application - the only monitor output is an unbalanced 1/4" phone jack, and muting the channel (mute button, not fader) does not mute the channel's monitor output - so any time you want to unplug a line from a channel, you have to mute the channel AND either turn the channel monitor control down, or pull back the full monitor fader.
 
jjjtttggg said:
I am usually a defender of the Xenyx series of mixers... I use a 1202 in my home studio, without the USB, but I've read the manuals and answered questions about most of them. When I saw your question I was fairly confident it was just a matter of the right combination of switch settings to do what you're trying to do... which is THE very thing that ANY audio device with a USB connection should be able to do... BUT... from what I'm reading about the Q502USB... for reasons I can't imagine, the engineers at Behringer must have taken the day off and left the design work to the weekend night shift janitor. There is NO EXCUSE for the patching behaviour of your mixer. The ONLY thing I can think of is that the weekend night janitor presumed you'd do your monitoring in the software. I'm not sure whether Audacity supports this or not. I know that Reaper does, although I've never needed to use it. Read up on Audacity's monitoring capability. It may let you do what you are wanting to do, if your computer is fast enough.

In case none of what I'm saying makes any sense.... With hardware monitoring (which you were expecting), you push the right set of buttons, and the phones get the sum of the inputs to the mixer/interface and the USB signal from the computer. What you hear in the phones is real time because it's all a direct analog connection between the inputs and your headphones. A properly designed interface will send the inputs to the computer by USB, but not the USB signal it's receiving from the computer, because that would make a feedback loop, and all is good.

With software monitoring, on the other hand (which the weekend night janitor at Behringer had in mind), you push the right set of buttons, and the mixer sends the inputs to the computer and sends whatever the computer sends to the headphones. In order to "play along with the track", which we ALL want to do, the software has to do the work. It has to grab your incoming signal for what you are playing, add it to the queue material (previously recorded tracks, karoake backing track, whatever) and send that combined signal to the mixer for you to hear in your headphones. The problem with this is that the computer has to have what you are playing, to combine with what you are going to hear before you hear it! You can't very well "play along" if you have to play it before you hear it!!!. Now if the computer is REALLY fast, what you'll hear is what you played just a few milliseconds or so ago, which will sound fine as you're playing along. This delay is called latency, and it's the reason software monitoring is an inherently flawed idea, and why Behringer doesn't normally let the weekend night janitor do their design work.

I exaggerate, of course... if you have a modern, reasonably fast computer, check the Audacity help for info about monitoring. It probably has this capability, and when you click the right button in the software, it will do just what you want to do, with a teeeny little delay that you probably won't notice. If Audacity won't do it, download Reaper. It definitely does have sofwater monitoring capability, and it's quite inexpensive (and totally "try before you buy"!!!). In my experience Reaper runs circles around Audacity, although in fairness I haven't used Audacity in at least 8-10 years. It could be a lot more today than it was when I last played with it....

Hope this helps!

J
Click to expand...

I have a similar configuration as MysticDaedra had. I've been trying to make software monitoring work with the Q502usb unit and audacity in my laptop, but as jjjtttggg explained, the latency was quite an issue, and at this time you can only use software monitoring in Audacity with a mono mix. So I tried another path to get a kind of HW monitoring by externally wiring the inexistent connections inside the Behringer unit. The "To Phones" switch either sends the usb/2-Track (set) or the main mix (unset) to the phones, but it does actually mix the inputs from both usb and 2-track. Additionally, the 2-track output is a clone of the main mix, so the only thing I did is wiring (with RCA cables) the 2-Track output to the 2-Track input, set the "To Phones" and unset the "To main mix". That way you get on your phones the usb input mixed with the main output, while only returning back to the DAW the main mix (without the backing tracks on the usb input). Anyway, be careful with unsetting the "To phones" or setting the "To main mix" buttons while the 2-Track output-input are connected, or you would have a nasty feedback loop...

I don't know if this is a "proper" way to get HW monitoring, and you lose one aux input, but I only have a Q502usb and no other interface, so this is the only way I've found with the devices I have, and at least it works for me with no latency problems. Perhaps the more experienced users in the forum could give some advice on this.

Regards,
JR
 
That's a great 'work around', but of course you see now why no on ehere recommends using a mixer as an audio interface.
 
The problem is not a design flaw or anything to do with it being a mixer. The problem is expecting a mixer/interface designed to capture the live mix through USB to work like a studio recording interface. There are USB mixers with exactly the right routing features for studio style overdub recording, but this is not one of them.
 
"I don't know if this is a "proper" way to get HW monitoring, and you lose one aux input, but I only have a Q502usb and no other interface, so this is the only way I've found with the devices I have, and at least it works for me with no latency problems. Perhaps the more experienced users in the forum could give some advice on this.

Regards,
JR"

Good on'ya JR!

So many people, not just noobs, are scared witless to experiment with connections and imaginative signal routings.

Yes, 95% of the time they don't work! Or result in hum or outright instability. But so long as you keep levels shut down and advance them slowly at switch on you should catch any nasties before ear are offended and it is most unlikely that any gear would be damaged.

One caveat: Speaker level outputs from amps must ONLY ever go to speakers or devices properly rated for the purpose.

Otherwise...Have a go noobs!

Dave.
 
Edit: forgot to include the obvious, you need to connect the main mix out to the other set of inputs on the monitors, otherwhise you will only hear the computer hehe. I don't mess with digital output because of latency, thus LIVE monitoring to me means you hear what you play without it being processed by the computer, this excludes using VST, etc and assumes you have a stand alone guitar processor, of course you can set your DAW to use software monitoring but in my case it introduces latency, as I mentioned earlier.

Might be a little late to the party but I would like to throw my 2 cents in:

I've found a workaround for this, it involves two scenarios which are using monitors and using headphones.

I'm using an imac and GarageBand, as well as a pair of Edifier Bookshelf speakers/monitors (nothing special BUT they have 2 sets of RCA Inputs).

First Scenario:

1. Set the output of your PC or Mac to Headphones, input should obviously be set to USB Codec. Run a 1/8 to RCA cable from the headphone out to one of the monitors inputs.

2. Connect mixer to computer via USB, connect your source (guitar in my case) thru the mic input on the mixer.

3. Monitor yourself live (control your volume through the main mix) and use your computer's volume to adjust the backing track's volume. What you record will be the sum of the inputs, in this case the isolated guitar.

Scenario 2:

1. Set the output of your PC or Mac to Headphones, input should obviously be set to USB Codec. Run a 1/8 to RCA cable from the headphone out to one of either the Line In (if you want to EQ on the mixer) or 2 Track inputs. Remember to send either input to Headphones.

2. Connect mixer to computer via USB, connect your source (guitar in my case) thru the mic input on the mixer.

3. Set your headphones level accordingly on the mixer, turn the main mix knob on the mixer to zero. You'll be monitoring directly on headphones, and you can adjust your backing track if you chose line in on the mixer, or use your computer's volume control if you chose 2 Track, your computer will receive only the main mix, that is your mic input because you sent the other inputs to Headphones.
 
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