ChurchProduction.com: I remember my first audio console (see image gallery). It was HUGE! Okay, I was four years old, so it towered over me. It was an Airline console from Montgomery Ward, a heavy hunk of blonde furniture with an AM-FM radio, a record changer in a drawer, and a 12-inch speaker packed inside. I spent hours in front of it, enchanted by the flowing music.
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This is something that I was just thinking about today, so it's interesting that there's an article about on the blog. I'm glad that this opinion piece was also backed up by the thoughts of a variety of industry professionals, because I think it could have easily just fallen into the trap of being a piece that really only covered the opinion of one person (the author) and would have made the opinion easy to dismiss. What was interesting to see was that the opinions were almost universal in that everyone pretty much agreed that consoles are not going out of style any time soon. It seems that people are moving to having modular attachments for their consoles, but not necessarily phasing out consoles as the home base for those modular attachments to function. It'll be interesting to see if consoles do eventually just become more modular systems with a clunky home base or if they actually just become modular systems with small individual pieces and bases altogether.
My personal opinion is that lighting desks aren’t going anywhere, and though those live in a different world than sound desks, they are both driven by the same concept. Both want to be very comfortable and efficient interfaces between what we want to do and how to make that thing get done, and that boils down to the word control. It may be a bit of a ‘lighting’ way to think about it, but the sound desk wants to control every input and map it to every output just like a lighting desk wants to control every parameter of every fixture (which I kinda consider outputs). Nonetheless, in situations as complicated as theatrical productions and other live events, centralization is key to control. Modularity and all the bells and whistles of apps and tablets should be used only in a capacity that enhances the versatility of the interface, not in a way that should be vital to the features of a control system (such as a sound or light desk). I just can’t see a world where desks are obsolete until the technology comes about that allows one to directly interface with microphones and speakers, or lights and dimmers, and then allows you to save that in a way that can be played back reliably.
I'm with Alex in the belief that lighting consoles are here to stay and are only getting better as time goes on. While consoles are really just souped up computers locked in a fancy box, those fancy boxes are very intuitive, and allow people who might not be the most knowledgeable in the field to easily bring up a wash at the very least. Having used keyboards with RVI's, consoles are significantly easier to manipulate than a simple keyboard and monitor. Now, the article discusses sound consoles, and a lot of the same principles apply. While playing with sound things on a computer is easy thanks to the advent of new programs and things like that, but mixing an entire theatrical performance on a macbook is much easier said than done. It's telling that everyone interviewed in the article agrees that consoles aren't obsolete, but continuing to evolve. I also agree that networking possibilities are much larger with boards, thanks to the multitude of ports and inputs that consoles can link into in a quick and easy fashion that computers can't catch up to without significant investments into desktops with loads of RAM and software. Until we can find an easier way to map inputs and outputs for sound, consoles are here to stay.
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