Last night at an event I had a problem where my 5000’s would lose sync between tracks most of the time. I was constantly riding the pitch adjustment buttons to keep things lined up, which was frustrating. I have a backup player, and a small Mackie mixer between my x1800 and the house system. I played a song off from that and rebooted all of the Denon gear to see if it would fix the issue but it did not.
I also tried playing from different sources. I’m paranoid that I’ll forget my thumb drive, so I’ve made duplicates of all my core music on SD cards that I leave in the players at all times. So I tried playing songs from each player’s SD card instead of the shared USB stick. Nothing changed.
I noticed a few other strange things. For one, certain songs wouldn’t sync up from the start. I would press the sync button, or hold it (I tried everything), but it would continue to flash and sync would never lock in. Other songs would sync on load or when pressing the button, and re-sync when pressing the sync button again, but would still drift off beat following a few loops. The sync button would start flashing to indicate sync was lost.
You may be thinking I was mixing songs with fudged up beat grids, but alas, this is not the case. All of my tracks have been prepped in Engine, and older songs with discrepancies in their timing have been warped in Ableton. They all have perfect time - every transient is aligned with precision to the grid. In addition, the players were indicating they were drifting out of sync. It’s not a situation where the grid marks stayed aligned while an individual song’s beat deviated from it’s own grid. The players sync button would start flashing, and the icon on the screen would indicate that the songs were no longer in sync.
The other thing I noticed occasionally was that the beat/bar indicators on each screen would not match between players. On one player it would show the green & white boxes lined up by both beat and bar (Stacked vertically), but the other player would show them being a beat or two out of alignment. I shot a video of this with my phone. It would seem to me that these should always match between players, since you can’t be lined up by bar on one player and not the other.
This is a pretty big deal, and I didn’t pull up other similar posts searching for “Sync” problems. So I’m wondering if others have experienced this, or if I may have a defective piece of equipment. If the latter, I’d like to figure it out while under warranty.
I’ve updated my players and x1800 to latest firmware, just to take that suggestion off the table.
Has anyone else experienced similar issues? If so, were you able to fix it?