UR816c routing questions

Steinberg Hardware UR-C Series
1

Man, what a learning curve…

Coming from the old MR816, the routing was so much simpler…

  1. I’m wondering what the point is of a master out when - or so it seems - all it can do is mirror one of the other pairs of outs - Mix1; Mix2; Mix3 or Mix4.

At the moment, I have my four headphone feeds going mono to
1L
1R
2L
2R

3R (mono) is being used for a mixcube I have.
3L (mono) is being used to feed a reamp box in the event I need that.

So… 4R/L is not being used, but I have set my main outs to receive signal from Mix4. Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of having outputs 4R and 4L?

  1. So, to use the REV-X reverb or the channel strip on input, you can’t send the output to the control room? Seriously?

  2. Trying to monitor a recording input channel with reverb. I can figure out how to do it using the DSP-MIX-FX app, but I want to do it within Cubase.

I have set my input channel to Mono In 4 and my output channel to Mono Out, which routes to my Mixcube. (because I can’t route it to my studio monitors, because they’re set up for my control room… grrr…

I can see and adjust the reverb FX, adjust the send level, etc in the UR816C tab in the inspector. (which has finally shown up… yay!)

Nothing. Well… I hear my voice, but no reverb.

However, if I go to the DSPMIXFX app, I can adjust it there, no problem.

Interestingly, though… none of my channel faders - the input channel, the audio channel with the monitoring light enabled, nor the mono out channel to the mixcube, nor the volume knob on the control room strip… none of them has any effect on the level at which I hear my voice coming out of the mixcube.

Adjusting the send amount to the RevX reverb in Cubase has no effect on the amount of reverb I hear.

Heh… even turning off the monitoring button on the audio channel I’m recording to doesn’t change anything.

Under Studio Setup, yes, I DO have the boxes checkboxed that say:
Load Scene Data from Project File
Channel Link setting follows created input/output bus configuration.

I have direct monitoring enabled, but even disabling that allows Cubase to “take over” or “over-ride” the DSPMIXFX settings.

  1. How in the world do you determine what is being routed, and thus, adjust/change what is routed through the headphones on the front panel?



    This is getting really discouraging.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

/sigh/

CT

2

Hmmm…

So I had been trying to monitor through a mono channel previously. (Because control room doesn’t seem to work when using monitoring reverb… grrr… so instead of monitoring through my studio monitors, which I would usually do, I was monitoring through my mixcube.

When I changed it to monitoring through the studio monitors - a stereo output - I could hear the reverb then and control the faders with success. Except… the reverb coming through was pre-fader. I was hearing ONLY the reverb and NONE of the direct signal.

/sigh/

CT

3

Well, if anyone is interested… I’m SLOWLY figuring this out.

  1. Okay, with ten output jacks in total, I guess it makes sense that one of those pairs mirrors another when it is advertised as 8 analog outputs.

However… Sending the Mix 1L to headphone 1; Mix 1R to headphone 2, etc. seems to have been wrong-headed.

I found I should have been running UR816C Daw Direct 1 to headphone 1, UR816C Daw Direct 2 to headphone 2, etc. This seems to have sorted a lot of goofiness.

  1. Still baffled (and a bit irked) that Control Room cannot be used when monitoring RevX or Morphing channel strip on the input bus. Seriously?!

So, my workaround is to use Mix 1R/L as my main out and select the headphone channel on Mix 1 also. And then - using a short patch cord, physically RE-PATCH the headphone out of the UR816 into an aux input of the headphone amp and send THAT out to the phones in my studio. Geeeeeezzzzzz…

  1. I was working on the premise that the DSP-MIX-FX app worked the same way as the old MR Editor with the MR816X. With the old MR Editor, you only needed to use that when you were not using Cubase. Everything - literally everything - including monitoring with REVX reverb using the control room - could be done within Cubase without having to launch the MR Editor editor.

It seems that this DSP-MIX-FX is required to be an adjunct to Cubase. Stuff just doesn’t work properly unless you actually go in and use the adjunct app to support the routing within Cubase.

I’d like to be wrong about that, but I don’t feel like I am.

  1. In keeping with my answer to #3, the routing to the headphones cannot be done in Cubase. It must be done in the DSP-MIX-FX app. You’ve got your four tabs along the right - Mix 1, Mix 2, Mix 3, Mix 4. Choose which Mix channels get sent out to the phones out on the UR816C.

Holy hell.

I’m sure this is a great interface, but it has NOT been an easy learning curve - especially given that this seems to be an evolution of the old MR816, you’d think it would work more or less the same way.

As miffed as I am right now, I really do hope I come to love this one as much as the old one.

CT

4

I have gotten to the point where I have my Dynaudio monitors working by being attached to Main Outputs, My MixCubes working by being attached to Line Output 2 L/R, my headphone distro amp playing the whole mix by connecting its channel A to Line Output 1 L/R and a Cue mix working properly by connecting the headphone distro amp’s channel B to Line output 3 L/R.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that I no longer get anything on my UR816’s Headphone 1 or 2. I have tried making a headphone channel in audio connections mapped to DAW Direct 1 & 2 but no luck. For grins and giggles, I also tried DAW Direct 3-8 but none of those worked either. Silence. The only way I’ve been able to make it work as a headphone channel that I can control from Cubase’s control room is to assign my last available Mix (4 L/R) to that headphone channel and then it all works the way it should. So, now that my kid has heard all kinds of new pirate words as I’ve talked myself through the mysteries of UR816C routing, I have a few questions:

  • How can I get the headphone channel routed into the UR816C’s headphone jacks such that I can control it from that portion of Cubase’s Control Room without burning up more Mix scenes from DSP? I saw in previous messages that it was not really possible to get HW-based RevX because reasons but I don’t remember seeing anything in the 20+ forum threads (yes literally), manuals, YouTube videos, etc. I consumed to get this thing working as outlined above.
  • What does DAW direct really mean? I recognize both words as English and even know what each means on its own. But together, those words don’t mean what I think they mean. How come DAW Direct 1 & 2 aren’t feeding my UR816C headphone jacks? I know the jacks physically work because I can do other unnatural things to get sound out of them but I can’t find a way to route signal to them without using my last DSP Mix scene.

@axemanchris and @ca-booter - you will never know how much I appreciate all the things you’ve written in these forums. I feel like I have progressed as a human being by dealing with this interface and just like in real life, even though I in one sense understood what you’d written, it wasn’t until I tried connecting cables, turning knobs, etc. that I truly began to understand a) what you were trying to teach us all and b) the agony you went through sorting this thing out. So thank you. If you are ever in the Washington DC area I will buy you a beer or two for all of your efforts.

Please, somebody help me route my UR816C headphone outs to the Headphone portion of Cubase’s control room. It’s all so close to being what I want it to be. Thanks!

PS: Here are other UR816C questions that occurred to me while I was curled up, whimpering in the corner, talking to myself and wondering if all my bad karma has been paid off as a result of my intersection with the UR816C:

  • Are all of us in this hardware forum part of a bizarre social experiment?
  • Is this whole thing like that movie., “The Last Starfighter?” Is there an alien race that has serious audio routing problems and they will select to help them somebody from Earth who can make this work - sort of like the video game helped them find an awesome fighter in the movie? Engineers in space…
  • Why didn’t they just number the outputs 1-8 and let us route each as we saw fit?
  • Is there any chance I can get my beloved MR816 CSX refitted with USB 3?
  • There is so much to like with this interface. It really sounds good and I am happy with it once I solve a mystery and level up to the next weird problem. What in the world happened to human-centered design?
5

So here’s a thing. I just yelled out the names of 11-12 deities, pleading to the universe to impart wisdom onto my poor little head. And you know what? I found that the headphone buttons on scene one in the DSP weren’t turned on. They were on in a different scene and I guess they can’t be active in more than one for some reason. So I turned them on and now I at least get signal. It’s controlled by the big red main knob and not the little green headphones knob in Cubase’s control room, but at least it’s signal.

Now I just need to know how to get one or both of those things managed by the headphones portion of Cubase’s Control Room. I can make it work the way I want to when I assign DSP scene 4 L/R to the Cue in Audio Connections and then activate headphone 2 on that scene. I just want to be able to have that functionality without spending my last scene on it.

6

HI there! Glad you’re finding this stuff useful. It is certainly a process for me too.

Glad you got the headphone thing sorted out. :slight_smile:

DAW direct is basically a “virtual output.” You route this within Cubase.

So… let’s say I create two DAW Direct output under the “studio setup” tab and call them “headphones A” and headphones B."

I can then go into “audio connections” and go to the control room tab and create a “Cue mix 1” and “Cue Mix 2” I can set each as mono and route them now to “Headphones A” (which I set before to be DAW Direct 1) and “Headphones B” (which would be set to Daw Direct 2)

Then in DSPMixFX, I can go to my settings and select “Line Output 2L/R” to send a signal from that Daw Direct 1 /2. (Remember above… we assigned those to Headphone A and Headphone B).

Those two jacks then will each send a mono signal out to a headphone amp that you can use for assigning Cue mixes.

Of course, the problem is that these - being virtual outputs - cannot have the RevX reverb and what-not routed to them. :-/

Good call on just having 8 outputs and letting the user assign them at will. I mean, I guess you can still do that - more or less - but it seems unnecessarily complicated.

Honestly, I have kind of given up on trying to force the Control Room integration with the UR816c and DSPMixFX, and that has been kind of liberating.

I set up my four cue mixes - if I need that many - in DSP Mix FX and call it a day.

Once I’m mixing and want my mixcube or reamp box or whatever, I’ll just reassign outputs under “audio connections.”

Chris

2 Likes
7

this routing discussion sounds like an issue I’m having. I need to hear a click track and I also need to hear the ‘system sounds’ in the OS. In my DAW (Reaper), I can assign the click track to any hardware output. If I assign to Mix 2, I lose the ability to hear the OS sounds, but if I assign to Mix 1, the viewers will hear the click/metronome.