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Re: [OM] New photo up

Subject: Re: [OM] New photo up
From: Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2013 11:18:03 -0500
> Thing is, we could buy TWO SC48's and THREE M7CL's for the price of ONE
> PM5D....

What about that new CL? Yowza!


> His argument was that he's seen two M7CL's crash in the middle of a gig.
> Ours are now four years old, have seen constant duty, and as I keep the
> firmware up-to-date, have yet (knock on wood) to see any sort of glitch.
> But he's calling the shots.  Honestly, the SC48 sounded pretty sweet - in
> some ways, much cleaner than the M7CL..

Do you have the iPAD app for remote setup? I would agree about the
preamps. Yamaha keeps getting them better, but they just don't have
the "tone" of some of the other boards. I was also going to ask if
you've got the WAVES plugin module for the M7CL? It's a beast to map
stuff in and out of, but man-o-man.


> One of the really nice features of the Avid mixers is that if you use the
> stagebox, and have all the mic pre's on stage only connected to FOH with a
> pair of coax cables, you can lose total power at the console and audio will
> continue to pass at the last known settings until you can get things booted
> back up and running.  And if you're using two Avid consoles, one at FOH and
> one at MonitorWorld, you can almost instantly pull FOH control to the
> monitor board until FOH gets back on its feet.

That is one of the best features of the AVID. I developed this feature
for a broadcast system and demonstrated it live on-air to a major
national network in their live satellite feed to 200+ stations. I
thought I was going to get decked by the engineers. One of the
engineers, though, who was one of these "impossible to get along with"
types and would rip every vendor apart in some form or another knew
what I was doing and kicked back and smiled. He was 20 steps ahead of
everybody else and suffered fools terribly. We became friends after
that. I don't think anybody else had the giblets to risk dead-air on
200+ radio stations to demonstrate a new feature. Looking back at it
now, I can't say it was one of my brightest ideas. But it was good for
another couple million in sales. But we were about to lose the account
to the competition and we needed a "Hail Mary". I did just that. The
sales guy almost puked up his socks when I pulled the plug.


> My boss has a soft spot for his old PM4K as well - he's mixed on it for
> most of his career - but he also appreciates the convenience of having
> everything in one package instead of having to patch in a big processing
> rack as well as the monster console.  But from a phototgraphic perspective,
> that PM4K is a wealth of oppportunities for art.

I still like a big flat board with complete channel strips. It's far
easier to do tweaking of multiple channels (and finding the odd one
not doing what you are expecting) than it is with the digital boards.
Especially when you are doing both FOH and monitor mixing on the same
board and you've got 8 monitor feeds. I still think Allen & Heath made
the best FOH/Monitor boards ever. Their new digital mixers carry on
that tradition.


> It would be fun... I mix on an LS9 at the club, have a Mackie Onyx 24-4 in
> my main room at the theatre, a Behringer DDX3216 for my studio theatre
> upstairs.  My plan for next year is to work up fundraising to replace the
> Onyx with the new Behringer X32 digital - it's getting raves everywhere,
> and can be had for $2400.

I can't get excited about anything with the Behringer label, but
that's my continued bias against them for their past technology theft
and contrived specifications. I've used the LS9 a couple of times and
do like it. There's a number of them used in churches around here.
Yamaha boards have a good install base in the AME and similar
churches. I've sold and installed many Mackie boards through the
years, but haven't specified one since probably 2005 when I went
exclusively with Yamaha and Soundcraft.


> - I have friends who own a studio with an SSL that I'd love to photograph,
> and I have a casual friend who owns a studio with a gorgeous old ex-RCA
> Neve that's dying for some love from the E-M5.

SSL boards are probably the best ones for doing landscape photographs
of. My favorite SSL board was down in Nashville and was the first
major board (and biggest board ever) to be converted to both analog
and digital. One press of a button on a channel and all the knobs
became remote controls of the DSP. You could map any channel in and
out of digital with a press of a button. It was used for mixdown and
premastering. For the better part of 10 years, almost all of the
country hits coming out of Nashville were mixed on this board to one
extent or another.

It was a simple concept, really. One that I had incorporated in other
mixer controls. Instead of running the real audio through the mixer
channel, you ran a specific tone through it instead. Then with a
simple A/D converter you could map the levels to the DSP to control
the actual settings for that channel of audio which is safely nested
away in the digital world. Obviously, it was a little more complex
than that as the overhaul of the SSL board alone cost about a
half-million dollars and the DSP engine was a hand-crafted
one-of-a-kind processor that was another four-times that amount.
Still, it was brilliant. They overhauled an existing board because it
was already a custom-built one that already had an awesome reputation.


> Sorry to the list for the wayyyy OT stuff.  But hey, it's still gear p*rn,
> just audio-guy gear p*rn instead of camera-guy gear p*rn.  Similar
> diseases, slightly different strains....

Some guys get excited about watches and pens. We get excited about audio mixers.



--
Ken Norton
ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.zone-10.com
-- 
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