I'm prone to thinking up crazy design solutions to existing problems none of which I'm capable of implementing, but I think it is fun to bounce the ideas off the wall with people who have more experience than I do. If you're not into ''what if'' then stop reading now.
I was reading the thread about the Presonus SL24 which turned into a 01v96 vs. SL thread and it got me thinking about the motorized faders and a couple of solutions. So follow my line of thought for a second...
Solution #1
My HT receiver (Yammie) has a digital attenuation knob and when you turn it, it displays the amount of attenuation on the display. Similarly, VCRs used to have a variable speed jog wheel for fwd and rewind.
The jog wheels always had a degree of latency to them but I don't notice any on my HT ''volume'' knob. I do notice however that no matter how fast you turn it, you can't go from 20% attenuation to 100% in one turn
The thing is, both of those were single purpose. If you had something similar on a mixer with button selectors which would change the display either full screen or inset, I'm thinking you could quickly adjust any setting for any channel.
I'm thinking, a bank of channel buttons and another bank of function buttons and a single jog/fader with full variable speed -- the engineering of which would be critical.
Along with the individual channel buttons there would be a group button which would then allow one to view and adjust a group including a preset of ''all channels''
Along with the function button would be a ''display'' button that would show all info for the channel selected or summary or pagable info for the groups.
I view these channel and function buttons as groups on one side of the console selectable quickly using one hand, selecting one from each group.
There would have to be some way of accessing things quickly in a panic. My limited experience tells me this is almost always the faders, sometimes more than one at time and not always in a nice predefined group. That is something that would have to be figured out.
#2 - similar to the above in that it would make use of virtual level controls but instead of just one, every pot. So you wouldn't know from looking at the gain pot what level it was set at, but you could easily recall a single pot's level by pressing it. This would be similar to some of the one-control systems found in higher end cars.
So a single press would display a single gain on the display, then turning it would adjust that gain.
A second press would be like right clicking a control in windows and give you a menu. On the gain, that menu might entail: channel, all gains and cancel among others. The channel option would display info for that channel and the all gains option would display a bar graph of all channels' gain levels.
A third press would return one to a default screen or whatever was displayed prior to the first press.
Of the two, I think #2 is the more viable option from a usability standpoint, but imagine it might be way too expensive to implement. Reliable multi-function pots like I describe would probably be pretty costly to develop if they don't already exist.
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I've never used any digital consoles so pardon me if something like this is quite common or well-known to exist on a certain model line.
I was reading the thread about the Presonus SL24 which turned into a 01v96 vs. SL thread and it got me thinking about the motorized faders and a couple of solutions. So follow my line of thought for a second...
Solution #1
My HT receiver (Yammie) has a digital attenuation knob and when you turn it, it displays the amount of attenuation on the display. Similarly, VCRs used to have a variable speed jog wheel for fwd and rewind.
The jog wheels always had a degree of latency to them but I don't notice any on my HT ''volume'' knob. I do notice however that no matter how fast you turn it, you can't go from 20% attenuation to 100% in one turn
The thing is, both of those were single purpose. If you had something similar on a mixer with button selectors which would change the display either full screen or inset, I'm thinking you could quickly adjust any setting for any channel.
I'm thinking, a bank of channel buttons and another bank of function buttons and a single jog/fader with full variable speed -- the engineering of which would be critical.
Along with the individual channel buttons there would be a group button which would then allow one to view and adjust a group including a preset of ''all channels''
Along with the function button would be a ''display'' button that would show all info for the channel selected or summary or pagable info for the groups.
I view these channel and function buttons as groups on one side of the console selectable quickly using one hand, selecting one from each group.
There would have to be some way of accessing things quickly in a panic. My limited experience tells me this is almost always the faders, sometimes more than one at time and not always in a nice predefined group. That is something that would have to be figured out.
#2 - similar to the above in that it would make use of virtual level controls but instead of just one, every pot. So you wouldn't know from looking at the gain pot what level it was set at, but you could easily recall a single pot's level by pressing it. This would be similar to some of the one-control systems found in higher end cars.
So a single press would display a single gain on the display, then turning it would adjust that gain.
A second press would be like right clicking a control in windows and give you a menu. On the gain, that menu might entail: channel, all gains and cancel among others. The channel option would display info for that channel and the all gains option would display a bar graph of all channels' gain levels.
A third press would return one to a default screen or whatever was displayed prior to the first press.
Of the two, I think #2 is the more viable option from a usability standpoint, but imagine it might be way too expensive to implement. Reliable multi-function pots like I describe would probably be pretty costly to develop if they don't already exist.
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I've never used any digital consoles so pardon me if something like this is quite common or well-known to exist on a certain model line.
