Dear console manufacturers - Coat Sleeve Surprise

Re: Dear console manufacturers - Coat Sleeve Surprise

I had a healthy serving of "Coat Sleeve Surprise" many years ago working on a Mackie CFX-20 I was stuck using. I had everything set up and had just fired up the system and there was a severe problem with a huge bump the mid band. I looked in the system processors and amp settings and everything else that I could bypass or try to work around. In the interest of getting things moving, I finally just tried to do my best to reverse eq the problem on the main graphic. Then it hit me! The main graphic! The CFX series has a nine band graphic eq built into the board, that I never used and kept flat. Sure as you-know-what, I'd grabbed 1K and 2K with a coat sleeve and pinned them to the top of the slider. I was pissed. I un-did everything I'd done to work around it and the show went of fine. In the days that followed, I taped the sliders to flat and took the board apart trying to find a way to either install a bypass button or permanently bypass the eq, which never happened. Now it's pretty much a back up to the back up boards.
 
Re: Dear console manufacturers - Coat Sleeve Surprise

Lee Douglas said:
I had a healthy serving of "Coat Sleeve Surprise" many years ago working on a Mackie CFX-20 I was stuck using. I had everything set up and had just fired up the system and there was a severe problem with a huge bump the mid band. I looked in the system processors and amp settings and everything else that I could bypass or try to work around. In the interest of getting things moving, I finally just tried to do my best to reverse eq the problem on the main graphic. Then it hit me! The main graphic! The CFX series has a nine band graphic eq built into the board, that I never used and kept flat. Sure as you-know-what, I'd grabbed 1K and 2K with a coat sleeve and pinned them to the top of the slider. I was pissed. I un-did everything I'd done to work around it and the show went of fine. In the days that followed, I taped the sliders to flat and took the board apart trying to find a way to either install a bypass button or permanently bypass the eq, which never happened. Now it's pretty much a back up to the back up boards.
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An interesting use for console tape...
 
Re: Dear console manufacturers - Coat Sleeve Surprise

Ivan Beaver said:
I don't remember the DM1 or 2Ks stopping the fader from moving if you weren't touching it-but I never tried to be honest.

As far as I remember the touch sensitivity was for touching the fader as a "select" function.

I always turned it off-because if you lightly touched the faders the selected screen would jump from channel to channel
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Yamaha DM2K, DM1K and I believe 02R96 have touch sensitive knobs.

You can select a wide number of functions you want associated with the fader sensing a human touch, but I have never heard of a way to make the mixer ignore touches if they are made with inanimate objects.

I sometimes do some gloved fader-pushing that would make this slightly challenging, anyways!

On the DM2K, just gently touching a fader cap will make the name of the channel in the channel strip display change momentarily to display what level either the fader or the active AUX send is at. Very nice feature as the faders near the end of their life span and gradually go out of calibration!

In the "custom layer" unused faders will move, but just return to their starting point when released. The same goes for faders that are locked using the "console lock".
 
Re: Dear console manufacturers - Coat Sleeve Surprise

Jay Barracato said:
The solution is really just to set your mixer up backwards so you can rest your arms on the doghouse and reach across all the other controls to grab the faders.

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD
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Probably still perpetuating urban myth, but didn't the BBC used to flip the faders upside-down (up was -INFdb, down was +10db). As you fall asleep, the talker would get quieter, not louder as your finger is pushing the fader up via body weight?

BRad
 
Re: Dear console manufacturers - Coat Sleeve Surprise

Brad Harris said:
Probably still perpetuating urban myth, but didn't the BBC used to flip the faders upside-down (up was -INFdb, down was +10db). As you fall asleep, the talker would get quieter, not louder as your finger is pushing the fader up via body weight?

BRad
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From what I recall reading about Abbey Road and other histories where this issue was mentioned, I believe it was not unusual for early consoles (that used faders) to operate this way. So not just confined to the BBC, but how widespread I have no idea.

When and how things changed to our current model of fader operation, I don't know. Whilst studio techs no longer wear white coats, they still likely have sleeves and cuffs of some kind - it would be interesting to know why things changed, as I find it hard to believe people have become noticeably less clumsy!

Sent from my GT-I8160 2
 
Re: Dear console manufacturers - Coat Sleeve Surprise

Nut the faders and mix with your gains. I'm assuming corporate speeches don't use monitors, I could be wrong.

Not pretty but would prevent that...
 
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