Description:

This driver controls a Lexicon MC-1 (or DC-2) A/V Processor running version 4.0 software. The Lexicon MC-1 and DC-2 are very popular processors, which lie pretty comfortably at the bottom of the high end of A/V processors. They aren't among those insanely expensive boxes, but are very powerful. They are purely digital boxes, with no analog pass-through, so they are very much home theater oriented processors, as apposed to audiophile oriented. Their support support for 7.1 channel systems is excellent.

This device has a dedicated client side driver, though it really doesn't need one per se. It is just provided as a convenience for the administrator. Here is a screen shot:

The driver allows you to control all of the things you can control from the MC-1 front panel. The power and volume controls are obvious, just click the power button to toggle the power and use the volume knob to adjust the volume.

You can also change the input selection, the current effect, and access some miscellaneous information via some popup context menus. To change the current input, right click on the input window, the one showing DVD above. You will get the following menu:

Just select the input you want to use and it will be selected. If you want to change the effect, right click on the effects window, the one showing Music Logic above, and you will be presented with the following menu:

In this menu, some commonly used effects are presented first, to allow you to quickly select them. You can also move through the effects in a next/previous sort of way, and you can get the full list of effects from which you can select if you want to get one of the less commonly used ones.

If you want to get to some miscellaneous functionality, such as getting Lexicon software version information, turn the front panel on and off, or toggle the mute, you can click somewhere in the background of the window, i.e. outside of any of the display widgets, which will get you the following menu:

General info just shows some general information about the Lexicon, such as the software level, software release date, and protocol version. This can be convenient for debugging purposes. The next two allow you to turn the Lexicon's front panel on and off, and the last one toggles the system mute state.

Quirks and Limitations:

This driver only supports the MC-1 and DC-2 running the V4 Lexicon software. It will not run any previous versions. It should handle any V4.x upgrades that might come out though, as long as Lexicon doesn't do anything silly to break backwards compatibility.

The Lexicon has two concepts of 'power'. There is a hardware power button on the back, which will completely power it down, but in almost all cases that would be left on all the time. The front panel power button just puts into sleep mode, and wakes it up when you are ready to use it. The power button on the client toggles that 'soft' power mode. The device will still respond to the power on command when it is asleep, so you can wake it up from the client interface.

Because of a shortcoming in the protocol, there is no way for a control system to know the Lexicon's soft power mode when it first connects to the Lexicon, so the driver will always turn the Lexicon on when loaded. After that, it can keep up with the power state without any problem, because the Lexicon sends it status messages. This is a bit of a pain for some people, but there is nothing that can be done about it.

When you set the effect, there will be a bit of a pause before the Lexicon processes that change. So if you write a macro that sets the effect and immediately accesses the value of the effect field, you might not see the change. It will take about a half second for the change to propagate. Put a pause in after changing the effect to insure that the change has taken place before continuing.

There is a bug in the Lexicon protocol that reports that mute is on any time that a digital input is selected, even when it is not. There is nothing that CQC can do about this.

Connection Details

The Lexicon MC-1 uses a serial connection. It requires a 9-pin straight through serial cable (not a null modem cable!) The serial port parameters are fixed, so you are not given a chance to configure them, you just get to choose the serial port. The parameters are 19,200 baud, 8 bits, one stop bit, odd parity.

Though you cannot open a terminal server program (such as the HyperTerminal that comes with Windows) and type commands at the Lexicon (because they are too complex and binary), you can see the automatically transmitted notifications. So once you have it cabled up, set up the terminal program and turn the Lexicon off and on, select different inputs, etc... and it should send out little data packets which you will see. If you can see them, then you can be pretty sure that your cable is good.

Driver Fields

This section lists the fields that the driver makes available, their types, minimum and maximum values, etc...

Name	Type	R/W	Description/Limits
AdjustVolume	Boolean	W	Though there is a Volume field for setting the volume to a specific value (and which is more efficient usually), if you are controlling the Lexicon via mapped IR commands or a user drawn interface, you will often want to be able to just adjust the volume up or down. So this field provides that capability. A true value increments and a false value decrements the volume.
BassLevel	Int	W	Allows you to adjust the sub-woofer output level. The values are -10 to +10, and are in dB relative to the base output level. This is a nice way to add a night mode to the MC-1, which doesn't have one built in. Day mode puts it back to the value you configured with the sound meter, and night mode drops it down maybe 6dB to keep the impact down without having to drop the overall volume until you can't hear anything.
Effect	String	R/W	Indicates the effect that should be used. It is an enumerated field which has legal values of: Church, THXCinema, TVMatrix, MonoLogic, Panorama, NightClub, ProLogic, MusicLogic, Party, SurroundNoise, PanNoise, ConcertHall, Cathedral, MusicSurround, Logic7, 2Channel ,2.0, 2.0_THX, 2.0_Logic7, 2.0_Music, 2.0_2Ch, Dolby, DolbyTHX, DolbyLogic7, DolbyMusic, Dolby2Ch, DTSFilm, DTSTHX, DTSLogic7, DTSMusic, DTS2Ch Note that, if you select an effect that isn't valid for the current signal type, the Lexicon will just ignore you and put back what it feels is something reasonable.
FPDisplay	Boolean	W	This field will turn the Lexicon's front display panel on or off, according to the Boolean value passed.
InputSrc	String	R/W	Indicates the input source to monitor. It is an enumerated field which has legal values of: Tape, Tuner, CD, Aux, TV, VDisc, DVD, VCR. If the Lexicon is not powered on, setting this field will cause it to wake up.
Power	Boolean	R/W	Indicates the power state. This is the 'soft' power state, i.e. the sleep/awake state, not the hard power.
Mute	Boolean	R/W	Indicates the mute state. Note that when the Lexicon is on a source with a digital input, this will generally indicate that muting is on. This is a side effect of the Lexicon software.
NextPrevInput	Boolean	W	This is a convenience field, mostly to make it easier to set up a next/previous input action, without writing a macro that looks at the current value and write a new value based on that.
TogglePower	Boolean	W	This is a convenience field, mostly to make it easier to set up a power toggle action without writing a macro that looks at the current value and writes the opposite.
Volume	Int	R/W	Indicates the volume of the Lexicon. It is an integral value limited to the range of -80 to 12.