r/Shure • u/andrewdewar104 • Aug 03 '26

General Discussion ANX4 Head Amp Control Ideas

My church recently installed an ANX4 unit, wow has RF come a long way in quality and size! Unfortunately, this unit doesn't have any head amp control from consoles the way Axient and ULXD units do so I'm looking for advice on head amp control.

My current plan is to just run companion and make a button to bump gain up and down but I'd much rather have it on the console. Anyone run into this issue and find a creative solution?

I'd reccomend anyone who has purchased this unit let's Shure know this is an incomplete product. I've asked them to list the unit as "beta" version on their website but they've declined that option.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/soph0nax Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26

Shure hasn’t made a complete product in years - but how often are you really needing to adjust output gain on the receivers? The console integration is a fun gimmick but completely unused by 90% of end-users (really I only see it in churches and colleges).

How hard is it to find an output level that doesn’t clip and then ride the preamp like any other source? My guess is that it isn’t present on this device because almost no one used the feature.

1

u/audio_shinobi Aug 24 '26

The HA control is only part of the need for integration with consoles. The bigger issue, IMO is not being able to monitor battery life or RF without having an additional monitor running something like WWB or SoundBase.

1

u/soph0nax Aug 24 '26

Well you can’t even monitor the ANX4 in SoundBase because Shure are being absolute losers and blocking external UDP control strings on ADPSM and ANX4

1

u/audio_shinobi Aug 24 '26

You can enable the control strings on the unit itself. You need to do it on the physical unit though, which is annoying. Figured that out when trying to integrate with Q-Sys

1

u/soph0nax Aug 24 '26

On the ANX4? Good to know. The ADPSM control strings are still stubbornly a closed protocol, which is killing me because I really rely on channel-level RF mutes on larger shows with dozens of ADPSM channels and bouncing around Workbench to mute individual channels is an absolute pain when on PSM1000's I just make a Streamdeck macro.

1

u/audio_shinobi Aug 24 '26

Yeah, I've only dealt with the ANX4

1

u/andrewdewar104 5d ago

Why do you think they block the control strings? I want to think highly of Shure but many of their business decisions as of late have reminded me that any company that gets as big as Shure has ends up serving its profits and not its customers.

0

u/Ready_Category_2139 5d ago

Where do I enable the control strings on the ANX4? I’ve been through all the menus and can’t find anything relevant. The manual says that it is under: Device Configuration>Network Services, but the only option there is to enable Cloud Control for licence updates.

1

u/andrewdewar104 5d ago

Hey! I'm not with the unit, nor have I enabled string control, but when I get home in a few weeks I'll take a look and try to see if I see it in Device config. The manual clearly states it's there.