I just finished a gig, after a few gigs without problems, tonight the same old issues I've had before switching from cat5 to midi occurred, it's getting frustrated.
On a song I got the timeout message on the mfc and no sound, had to restart the axe. Then on another song the volume was twice than normal as if I had to parallel rows summing at output. And finally on another preset the axe screen went blank and no sound.
This is getting frustrating, tomorrow I have another big gig on a festival in Belgium, and I just can't enjoy performing if I have to spend the gig hoping that the axe gets through the tune... There must be a fix, please, help me figure it out.
Btw I'm running fw 3.02 on an axe 2 mk2 and latest fw on the mfc101mk3.
How long is your 7-pin midi cable?
Under certain circumstances and in certain locales 7-pin cables that are longer than 10ft can give problems with the MFC's power supply's ability to fully boot up the MFC and to stay booted up.
What you'll see if this is happening is all the MFC's leds lit up solid at the same time with no communication at all between the Axe and the MFC.
What country are you in?
In some locales the line current will be less than officially stated which can cause the MFC's power supply and 7-pin connection to fail.
Connection methods that don't use the MFC's power supply (i.e. its wall wart) won't suffer if the current is low though. (see below)
Fractal actually has a fix for MFC units that exhibit this problem that involves swapping out one of the MFC's circuit boards making the MFC's boot up routine more reliable when using longer 7-pin cables or in locales with lower than expected current.
They may even do it for free.
If this is what's happening to you then you should contact Fractal Support asap.
The most reliable way to connect the MFC is via FasLink.
Second most reliable is CAT5, but finding a CAT5 cable that will work every time can be an issue, especially if our Axe is a MKI (or MKII?).
The earlier Axe's have a strange design to the Ethernet port in that the female Ethernet jack is recessed a couple of millmetres into the Axe's chassis.
Most CAT5 cables have a little length of plastic (or rubber) surrounding the cable's male jack which can interfere with being able to insert the jack all the way into the port on the Axe causing a bad or unreliable connection.
Sometimes a bad or lost connection at the port can be fixed by merely jiggling the jack in the port.
Some CAT5 cables can be improved for usage with an early Axe by taking an Exacto knife and trimming away some of this surrounding material on the cable's jack.
Hope some of this is helpful.
But your issues about the Axe's lcd screen going wonky appear to not be related to any of this, so you may have a totally different issue or set of issues.
