46 l August 2013
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make it simple to connect the console to a WAP or router. The Roland WNA1100-RL Wireless USB Adapter was introduced to use with the consoles to establish a wireless connection, allowing the user to remotely control the console with the iPad from the stage or any location in the house.” Things have been busy at
Cadac HQ in Luton, UK, with the anticipated shipping of the CDC eight digital console and the addition of Midas mainstays Richard Ferriday and James Godbehear to the payroll. In his new guise, quite an adjustment to regular observers of the desk trade, Ferriday confirms that interface ergonomics now draws heavily from Apple’s consumer innovation. “When mixing live sound,”
he says, “the operator has to be able to respond immediately. An audio console has to be fast,
intuitive and able to convey the maximum information in an instant. Cadac’s design team has been closely monitoring the advancing trend of screen-based gesture control as implemented on thousands of smartphones and tablet-based computers, and has used this as the basis of navigation on the CDC eight. Operators will quickly find this a natural way of working.” Elsewhere the emphasis is on
how far the gesture reaches, rather than the gesture itself. “Control has been given a rethink,” acknowledges Avid’s Radford. “By incorporating the open EUCON control protocol, an Avid console can not only control the engine for a live mix, but also serve double duty as a workstation controller in the studio – or hotel room, or bus lounge. Engineers are able to control Pro Tools – or any of the
Cadac’s CDC eight –a “natural way of working”
dozens of third- party applications that support EUCON –
using a familiar, compact control surface. The results of this work have culminated in the new Avid S3L system, which begins shipping this summer.”
KILLER HERTZ Somewhere in all of this connectivity and control lies the issue of audio quality, addressed directly only by a few and, presumably, taken as read by the many. “Cadac is, first and foremost, an audio company,” says Ferriday. “Continuing dedication to this keystone value is manifest in the way in which the company has approached the design. The aim is to replicate, if
Avid’s S3L system will begin shipping this summer
conversion throughout
and 32/40-bit floating point processing, to the sample- accurate phase-coherency of its summing busses.” Both DiGiCo and Avid are also pushing the sonic envelopes. “The advanced floating-point HDX digital audio processing used in the latest generation Pro Tools systems powers our newest live product,” says Radford, “bringing superior sound quality and giving live users access to the latest plug-ins from Avid and third parties, all without needing external plug-in racks or servers.”
which provides our users an almost OB- or recording studio- like function in their recording flexibility,” explains Gordon.
POCKET CALCULATORS None of this, though, escapes the grubby end of market forces. “For Soundcraft and Studer, the main factors influencing the digital console market at the moment are price, alongside demand for new features or workflow enhancements,” says Neal. “At the lower end of the market, prices of digital consoles fall every year as the technology becomes less expensive. We
“For Soundcraft and Studer, the main factors influencing the digital console market at the moment are price, alongside demand for new features or workflow enhancements” David Neal, Soundcraft Suder
not improve upon, the audio performance of the legendary Cadac analogue consoles: from the quality of the CDC eight’s mic preamps, the implementation of 24-bit 96kHz A-D and D-A
NEW KIT ON THE BLOCK
No better proof can be found of the rude health of the digital live console market than the debut this year of a certain UK marque. It’s a solid brand, it’s certainly state of the art and – if this business is as robust as it seems – it’s entirely logical. “We set out to provide the
kind of benchmark audio quality and creative inspiration that SSL is renowned for in music recording, combined with ample power, the flexibility to serve in a wide range of applications and total reliability – and we’ve achieved these things in a number of ways,” says Jason Kelly, live console product manager at Solid State Logic and another Midas renegade (pictured). “Benchmark audio quality in terms of mic pres, A-D/D-A conversion and signal path is something we have proven repeatedly. Once you have solid audio foundations, delivering an inspired mix is
about the tools you give the engineer and the user interface you present them with. “The audio processing toolkit within SSL Live provides a combination of precision control alongside processing designed to inject genuinely musical tonal character. A really powerful console is one that has enough capacity to handle the task at hand and it’s a simple fact that the SSL Live delivers more
power in terms of audio paths, flexible console architecture and sheer processing power than any other console at the price. From a control perspective our ambition was to give engineers a user interface that lets them configure it to suit their own unique workflow, and puts all of the power and processing tools at their fingertips in an elegant and intuitive way that will actually be creatively rewarding to use.”
“This year, we’ve concentrated on lower latency and sonic capacity upgrades, increasing the sample rate on all our consoles to 96kHz,” adds Gordon. “This means that as higher sample rates are required, we can accommodate them. Thanks to the power of our FPGA engine design, we can do this without any compromise in audio processing, so every console will still retain the same number of channel counts it originally had no matter what the sample rate.” Not that DiGiCo has a monopoly on Field Programmable Gate Arrays: UK broadcast expert Calrec has been using them in its Bluefin technology for several years, albeit optimised for broadcast workflow. The similarities between live broadcast and live concert are likely to draw these digital console designs into the same universe, rather than parallel ones, over the coming year. Another advancement is in on-board recording. PreSonus and Innovason have both upgraded their hard disk access, while DiGiCo is thinking patchbay… “It’s now possible for an engineer to pick individually which inputs go to which record outputs, via the MADI router
responded this year with the introduction of the Soundcraft Si Expression, which has been really successful in just a few months. This console features many of the same facilities as some of our larger desks, but at a much more affordable price.” This is the language of Music
Group, the multinational now home to Behringer, Midas, Klark Teknik and Turbosound, and therefore charged with balancing the marketing requirements of the X32, the most affordable digital mixer with the most advanced components, and the PRO series: the most affordable high-end consoles with the most cost- effective components – all contained within the Behringer gestalt. But it’s working: sales figures for all of these desks are strong, so the markets are being found. Maybe it’s not workflow that’s being enhanced the most. Maybe it’s cashflow. n
www.allen-heath.com www.avid.com www.cadac-sound.com www.digico.biz www.innovason.com www.midasconsoles.com www.presonus.com www.solid-state-logic.com www.soundcraft.com www.yamahaproaudio.com
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