The Guide · Part 1

Foundations

Read this section once. It's the mental model that makes everything else click. After that you can live in Part 2 and Part 3.

1.1 — How a channel actually flows

Every channel on the X32 runs audio through the same chain, in the same order, every time. The board's on-screen tabs (Config → Gate → EQ → Dyn → Sends → Main) are laid out to mostly match this flow, which is handy.

Here's the signal path, start to finish:

• Source
• →
• Preamp / Trim
• →
• Ø Polarity
• →
• Low-cut
• →
• Gate
• →
• EQ
• →
• Dynamics
• →
• Insert
• →
• Fader
• →
• Pan
• →
• Sends
• →
• Main

Walking through it in plain terms:

• Source — the physical input (a local XLR on the back, or a channel coming in over AES50 from a stagebox).
• Preamp / Trim — where the quiet mic signal gets amplified up to a usable level. This is the most important knob in the whole chain (more on why in 1.2).
• Ø (polarity) — flips the waveform upside-down. Fixes phase problems between two mics on one source (like snare top + bottom).
• Low-cut (HPF) — a filter that throws away everything below a frequency you choose. Cleans up rumble, handling noise, and low-end mud before it hits anything else.
• Gate — an automatic mute that opens when the signal is loud enough and closes when it's quiet. Keeps a mic shut when its instrument isn't playing.
• EQ — tone shaping. Four bands of "turn this frequency up or down." Where you fix boxiness, harshness, or a lack of air.
• Dynamics (compressor) — evens out the loud-vs-quiet swings so a source sits consistently in the mix.
• Insert — an optional detour to send the signal out to an external processor (or an internal FX slot) and back.
• Fader — the level of this channel in the main mix. What your hand rides.
• Pan — where it sits left-to-right.
• Sends — copies of the channel going to monitor mixes, effects, etc.
• Main — the channel arriving at the main L/R (and optionally the mono/center bus).

The one thing you can reorder: the compressor can sit before or after the EQ. That's a toggle in the Dynamics config (labeled PRE/POST EQ). Default is EQ → comp, which is what you want most of the time. There's a section on when to flip it in Part 2.

1.2 — Gain structure (the part everyone skips and shouldn't)

If you get one thing right, make it this.

Gain structure just means: setting the right level at every stage so the signal is strong enough to be clean, but not so strong it distorts. Get it right at the front and everything downstream is easy. Get it wrong and no amount of EQ or compression will save you.

A few ideas to anchor on:

• The X32 is a digital desk, so its ceiling is 0 dBFS (dB Full Scale). Hit 0 and you get ugly digital clipping — not the warm kind, the nasty kind. So 0 is a wall, not a target.
• Leave headroom. You want your average signal sitting comfortably low, with plenty of room above it for unexpected peaks — a drummer who hits harder in the chorus, a singer who belts the bridge. A good rule of thumb: aim for the meter to average around the −18 dBFS mark, with peaks not exceeding roughly −6 dBFS. That leaves ~18 dB of breathing room.
• Set for the loudest thing that'll happen, not for soundcheck. People play harder at the gig than at check. If you set gain so soundcheck peaks at −3, you have no room left when it counts. Set it so the loudest expected passage peaks around −6, and let quieter moments sit lower.

How you'll actually do it: solo the channel (PFL/AFP), watch the meter, and have the source play its loudest realistic part. Ride the preamp gain until you're hitting the target with the fader at unity (0 dB / the "U" mark). Setting gain with the fader parked at unity means your fader starts each show in a sane, familiar place.

1.3 — Analog gain vs. digital trim (two different knobs, know which is which)

The X32 gives you two ways to change a channel's level, and they are not interchangeable:

• Analog gain (the head amp / preamp) — this physically amplifies the signal at the input, before it's even converted to digital. This is your primary gain control and the one 1.2 is all about.
• Digital trim — a level adjustment after the signal is already digital. Think of it as fine-tuning, not gain-setting.

Ninety percent of the time, you set the analog gain and forget the trim exists. So when does trim matter?

The shared-preamp gotcha. Here's the classic trap. On a stagebox (over AES50), the preamp is a physical piece of hardware attached to that input. If FOH and the monitor engineer are both pulling from the same stagebox input, they share that one preamp. If monitor-world cranks the gain because the drummer wants more kick in his wedge, FOH's kick just got louder too — and vice versa. Chaos.

The fix: one side (usually FOH) "owns" the analog gain and sets it properly. The other side uses digital trim to make their local adjustment without touching the shared physical preamp. Everybody stays friends.

Even in a FOH-only rig, trim is useful for nudging a channel's level without disturbing a gain setting you're happy with — for example after you've already built a bunch of monitor sends off that channel and don't want to shift all of them.

In a worship setting this comes up constantly, because the same X32 usually feeds both the house and the musicians' in-ears — and often the players tweak their own in-ear mixes from a phone or tablet app. Everyone is sharing those preamps. So set each gain once, properly, at the source, and make per-mix adjustments with sends and trim — never by grabbing the head amp.

1.4 — Patching and routing (getting the input to the channel)

Before any of the above, the signal has to arrive at the channel. Two layers here:

• Physical → console. Inputs reach the desk either through the local XLR jacks on the back panel, or over AES50 from a digital stagebox (the S16 is the common one). AES50 carries dozens of channels down one cable, which is why the stagebox lives on stage and only one snake runs to the desk.
• Console → channel. Once signals are in the desk, you tell each channel which input to listen to. This lives in two places:
  • The Routing screen, where you map blocks of physical inputs to blocks of channels (the "big picture" patch).
  • The channel's own Config tab, where you can confirm or override the source for that one channel.

For a standard show you set the routing once (e.g. "Local inputs 1–8 feed channels 1–8, stagebox inputs feed channels 9–32"), save it, and mostly forget it. The per-channel source select is there for when you need to break the pattern — patching a spare input to a channel that died, say.