Question

Hi, I've been having the same problem ( signal drops) frequently over the past year in almost every church service and rehearsal. I've raised a couple of tickets, and as a last resort, yesterday, Presonus told me to send them for repair.  It is outside the warranty period and will be expensive to ship as I'm on an island far away. Our NSB 16:8 was purchased in 2019, and we daisy chain it. I read that you may have to purchase an AVB switch. Did that work? I did query Presonus about that, but they never responded. So, before sending it for repair, I would like to know if any of the proposed solutions worked. Otherwise, we're going to analogue with a wired stage box and forget everything to do with the network. We cannot be spending more money on this. It is disappointing. So, anyone buying,  think twice before purchasing the NSB.

Answer 1

More than likely, your issue may be related to the network cable you are using.  

I experienced the same issue with my NSB 32.16.  Long story short, the issue was related to the use of a shielded (STP) network cable and static electricity.  Basically, when a static charge would build up (in the console, in the NSB, in the ethernet cable... this is all normal for anything electronic), an audio drop would occur when someone would touch the console, or a microphone (because pin #1 is grounded to the NSB chassis), or if they even touched the NSB.  The person touching the gear would cause a grounding issue.

To correct the problem, I removed the ground/shield from only one end of the network cable.  This makes the cable un-shielded, which results in a "ground-lift" between the console and the NSB (along with anything connected to the NSB).  The result, was that using an un-shielded network cabled corrected all my audio drop outs.  In fact, Presonus (in some of their documentation) makes reference for the use of UTP cable over STP.  The idea is to remove the shield from only one end of the cable.  Leave the other end connected so that static bleed/charge will dissipate through the gear it is attached to; doing this will NOT cause a static discharge issue.

All of my network cables are Ethercon, therefore, it was easy to remove the shield.  I'm not sure how much of an effort there would be to remove the shield/ground pin in a non Ethercon cable.