Anyone using a tablet to control their gear via wifi, or other?
Please weigh in of you actually USE this gear. No links, or pasted articles please.
(my eyes are blurry from watching tons of it already)

Specifically, I'm looking at the Behringer X Air XR12/16/18 series. Many say that the internal wifi is pretty weak. Thoughts?

Not what you're looking for, I know, but my SEVEN uses a WI-FI patch editor; in fact, that's the ONLY way you can edit it. Of course this makes this another annoying, useless response to your post (but it IS wifi and I DO use it ).

chas

All wifi advice is accepted here, thanks. From what I understand, if the wifi is interrupted, the mixer will still operate at the current settings (not so bad), but with crowded bandwith in big rooms, I'm a little concerned about setting up a mix. My intended use will have the mixer (stage box) very near my iPad, which controls it. I'm hoping that the close proximity "may" be somewhat of a saving grace ... although, in my own home I sometimes have wifi dropouts in the same room as the devices. Go figure, right?

But hey, congrats on your new studio toy! Four organs ... wow.

I've been using Wifi based mixers for years, if you have a real router, you won't have any problems of drop out, the Behringer series with the built-in routers seem to only work at home, and with maybe 25 feet of reliable range. They are great mixers, sound great, but you need an external router.

Since then I have used many different ones, I've settled on the Yamaha TF-Rack, for a lot of reasons, but for especially one, is that at any time I can do anything right on the touch screen if I need.

Hey Frank ... it seems I "MAY" be able to hard wire the iPad to the XRseries with a lightening to ethernet adapter. Being wireless is not my concern - footprint, and accessibility is. Ever seen that combo work?

Using X18 Air live. Internal wireless router no good in a noisy wireless environment and so very dodgy in most venues.I use an external dual band router and connect on the 5G band.

Very solid and responsive connection although I do get very occasional dropouts; could be my Kindle Fire tablet rather than the Behringer. My drummer used a series 1 iPad Air and has not seen any dropouts, he's also using the 5G band.

Within the android app I use a custom layer to show just what is important. Can't get this to work on the iPad.

Side issue - also remote controlling an X32 for the church band I'm in using the Fire, again via 5G on an external router and this is noticeably less solid, Could be the Fire but not been able to do a comparison with a iPad yet.

The differenece between the 2.4 and the 5G band is huge..

The 2.4 has 13 channels, that overlap.. the range is larger but in general there are 6 or 7 channels interfering with eachother.. every user in the range uses a share of the bandtwidth, so with a full room and everyone having their wifi channel on... performance quickly drops.. and since the range is much bigger there is allways more people to interfere

The 5G has many more channels that don’t overlap.. also the range is much smaller so there are less people in range.. if the access point and your device are close, there is much less chance on interference..

I think i would dare to set up a live set with some 5G wifi connection... but definately not with a 2.4. Still many decices only support the 2.4 band.

Hi Folks,

Long time since i posted here on the forum but reading few times a month.
Looked first for the Behringer X18 but bought the Soundcraft Ui24r because of the amount of channels and capabilities.
I like it very much!
The only weak part is exactly like the Behringer X18, the internal WiFi.

As a WiFi engineer i spent several hours in testing in different setups, internal and external.

If you just disable the internal WiFi and use an external router you can't go wrong.

Don't worry for 2,4 or 5GHz, both will do fine even if you're in a busy environment.
With an Android phone you CAN use WiFi-analyzer to choose channels but in my opinion it's not giving you much advantage.
You're not sending much data via WiFi since both mixers aren't actually streaming.
So if you use the player, the data is on the USB stick and you just give the command to play, nothing more and nothing less.
It's just the quality of the internal WiFi which is causing dropouts.
Just take a good router like Asus, Netgear or Linksys (Cisco) and you're good to go!

Greeting from the Netherlands

I forgot to mention that I use a Wi-Fi analyser to check that I don't have a channel clash.

As ReneT notes 2.4 is very crowded, to the extent that a completely free channel is usually impossible to find. 5G is much clearer. My router is set to channel 46 purely because it was not the band my home Wi-Fi uses. So far I've never had a clash.

I was not aware the 5G was shorter range! As I'm always within 5m of the router this has not been an issue. How far away can you go before the signal starts to falter on 5G?

I was at a jam session about 2 weeks ago; they had one of the Behringer mixers that someone was working with on a laptop (no cables, so I assume WiFi). The guy running kept saying that It kept dropping the connection. The mixer kept working, but sometimes the guy running it couldn't make adjustments via the laptop/WiFi. I don't know, but I think they only used the built-in WiFi that Behringer had in it (no special router) ...

Sort of a side note: I have been using my Genos in Access Point mode as a router for networking multiple iPads at gigs, and that works well 98% of the time, but occasionally there are issues. I think in this case, Genos has a fixed (changeable manually, but not 'automatic') channel for WiFi, so that could be an issue. A proper 'real' physical router with 'auto' channels might work better; will have to try that.

Jim

Decided to drop the idea of a mixer. Don't need one ... at least all summer. My VoiceLive3 has such great I/Os and the monitor mix is just what I need.
Thanks for weighing in, everyone.

Dave, I dropped a mixer more than 15 years ago - just don't need one as an OMB entertainer.

Gary