CMU School of Drama


Sunday, November 25, 2012

Live Sound: Multiple Consoles: Top Engineers Weigh In On The Where, When, Why & How

Pro Sound Web: A few years ago, my company developed a prototype of a console switcher that would enable an engineer to quickly switch to a backup should the main desk go down, or quickly switch between multiple consoles at events such as festivals. But when we showed it to various engineers, the response was all over the place. Some thought it was a great idea, others felt that with modern processors, the need was no longer there, and some suggested fixes such as increasing the size to accommodate larger systems.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I think articles like these are always so interesting.For example this article discussed what problems a sound designer in today's world would encounter with larger shows and events and what the best solutions were. Articles like this show how complex the world we work in is.

One designer could be using an analog system with the other using a digital yet the other designer could have an entire different system on how sound was processed or even altered. I think things like this are extremely important to show all the solutions out there and what engineer/designer may do to solve a variety of problems.

rmarkowi said...

My cousin is a sound designer for movies in hollywood, and he uses benches upon benches of consoles. I know the way he does it is he sets all the other mixers up to mix a specific set of whatever he needs, and then controls the master volume for that set using pages on a digital board that acts as the main console. In movies, this is possible, but in live theatre, someone needs to be at those consoles. I am very interested in the to make this possible.

Unknown said...

I've been in situation where using multiple consoles was absolutely necessary, due to limitations in the channel count of the mixing consoles available to me. What was nice about the article is that it touched on methods of combining the outputs of different consoles in ways other than simply daisy chaining them together. It's good to know that in a pinch there are ways of getting around the obstacle of various mixing consoles and one PA system.