List of Levels

You are designing the audio system for a very large restaurant that includes a large lounge area. The lounge includes many entertainment options for its patrons—big screen sports from a satellite TV feed, a variety of music channels fed into a powerful speaker setup, and, on occasion, live rock or acoustic music concerts. There are, therefore, many different sources requiring volume control. The restaurant owners want the lounge personnel to have easy control over the volume of each of these sources. On some evenings, one source is more important than the others. For example, during the NCAA March Madness, the TV sports take precedence.

Hardware Controls

A DR3 works nicely for this scenario. The end user turns the DR3 knob to highlight a level control in the list on the DR3 LCD. The end user then adjusts the volume knob, which changes the volume for the highlighted source.

Halogen Configuration — Hardware Workspace

1. Add one DR3 to the Hardware Map.
2. Double-click the DR3 to open its properties, and then configure its Control Mode as List of Levels.
3. Define the correct number of Level controls by adding or deleting controls. In this example, we need three Level controls (TV volume, music volume, live music volume). It is also a good idea to name each control for easy identification when working in the Processing Workspace.
4. Optionally, name the DR3 and/or manipulate its Backlight Settings. Note that the name configured here is not the display name that appears on the actual device.

Halogen Configuration — Processing Workspace

For this procedure, we assume you have already configured your Processing Map for the different audio sources and that your map includes some form of Level control for each source. For the purpose of this example, we will use actual Level blocks, although the Level control could be in another type of processing block such as an Output or Mixer block.

1. In the Processing Map, locate the relevant Level blocks and open their properties dialog boxes by double-clicking each block.

2. Display the hardware controls by clicking the Control tab in the palette area, and then locate the relevant DR3.
3. Drag the link icon associated with the DR3's Level control intended for the TV volume and drop it on the link icon associated with the Gain parameter in the TV's Level properties dialog box.
4. In the prompt dialog box that appears, confirm that you are creating a new control link, and give the link a meaningful name for easier identification later.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for the music audio and for the live music audio.
6. In the Control palette, click each DR3's Level control to open its properties.
7. Customize the Display Label for each DR3 Level control. This is the label the end user will see in the DR3's list of levels on its LCD screen.

1. In the Processing Workspace, open the properties dialog box for all of the Level controls participating in the link (if they are not open already):
   • In the Control palette, click the three DR3 Level controls.
   • In the Processing Map, double-click the three Level processing blocks.
2. Within one of the properties dialog boxes for one of the control links, change the volume. The other controls participating in the link should reflect the volume change.

tip: To avoid visual clutter and more easily track the changes in all relevant participants, it is helpful when testing to place the properties dialog boxes for a single link's participants in close proximity to one another.