Consoles?

There are two kinds of live sound consoles to choose from nowadays - analogue and digital. Most of us are familiar with the analog consoles with its banks of knobs and sliders. However, in the last few years, the price of digital consoles have steadily gone down, making these consoles, usually lacking the massive amount of knobs and engendered with an LCD screen or two, an attractive option for replacing the analog console. Throw in all the bells and whistles like built-in processing and effects plus a small footprint.....one can see the future as a digital future.

While digital consoles seem to have a bit of a steeper learning curve than the analogue console, the principals remain the same. Advantages of using a digital console include instant recall with memories, small physical footprint, loads of audio processing and connectivity. Disadvantages include the user interface, dependence on a central processing unit and possible issues with AD/DA quality and interconnectivity.

My personal experience with digital consoles have always been positive. My first digital console was the Yamaha Promix01 which was released sometime in 1994. I remember seeing it in EQ magazine with Roger Nichols using it for the Steely Dan live tour. The Promix was very basic compared to what is out in the market today. It had 16 inputs, only three assignable dynamics processors, s/pdif output and no expansion slots. The EQ was pretty edgy and the converters were not the best sounding ones out there. But it had a few things going for it - instant recall, full parametric EQ on every channel, it was dead quiet and cost approximately just a tiny fraction of any console out in the market that had recall or was digital. I eventually ended up with two units daisy chained for 32 channels of mixdown from ADAT recorders and used them for some musicals. Unfortunately, the Promix units had an inherent problem with the circuitry that causes them to die after three years. I've got them in storage in Singapore at this point, just massive paper weights since they are worth close to nothing in the market.

Currently, Yamaha continues to lead in the development of digital consoles, especially in the lower cost end with the LS and M7CL series. Other manufacturers were a little slow off the block but are catching up with various incarnations in terms of interface. Some are a breeze to use, some are a total pain. Consoles that I've tested and used recently include the Yamaha DM2000, M7CL, 01V96, PM5D, PM1D, Digidesign Venue, Soundcraft Vi series and Digico D5. All of them are amazing in their own way and each manufacturer offer different interpretations of what they think a live sound engineer would like to see in a digital board.

The main enemy of digital consoles is obsolescent. While we can expect an analog console to last for seven to ten years; digital consoles generally become out of date within a couple of years. This doesn't mean that they're unusable after that time, just that newer models will come out costing less with more features and better sounding converters, making your existing digital console feel crappy, sound cheaper and basically junked overnight in terms of value, a victim of Moore's Law.

However, having said that, I will probably never go back to mixing on an analog console nowadays. When on tour, you carry a lot less in terms of processing racks. Installed in a venue, the smaller footprint allow for more seats, which usually translate into money paying punters. Having recall capabilities, processing on all I/Os, remote control and backup capabilities has convinced me that the digital lifestyle is definitely worth living :-)