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Digital Console purchase for a 400 capacity theater
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<blockquote data-quote="Simon Coffin" data-source="post: 147708" data-attributes="member: 388"><p>Re: Digital Console purchase for a 400 capacity theater</p><p></p><p>Greetings everyone,</p><p></p><p>Time for an update now that I am finally back from NAMM. The snow storm in the North East rattled my flight plans and led to an unplanned extra 3 nights in LA. It's hard to complain about being stuck when temps are in the 70s, skies are sunny and the beaches go on for miles, so I won't. The accountants will however. </p><p></p><p>Just a thought about NAMM first. While there is more equipment to see and play with then the average human would ever need, exhibitors are definitely in two categories. Some are there to present their products, do show and tells, discuss the details, talk to users or potential users. Others are there only to sell. Unfortunately Music Group was amongst the latter. While they had the largest booth by far, a sleek, modern, two level palace in shiny white, complete with live music, snacks and cute girls in tight skirts serving Martinis, they had exactly one piece of equipment on display, a Midas Pro-X console. Nothing else. If you were a distributor and wanted to buy a couple dozen, "Come on in.". If you were Clair Brothers or Rat Sound or a large regional provider, "Come on in." If you were just an audio engineer trying to learn about and compare equipment in order to make an informed purchase, "Nope, can't help you." After flying across the country to see their products, I was less than impressed.</p><p></p><p>Luckily Allen & Heath and Digico had all their products on display, plugged in and working with a staff of factory and regional reps to answer questions. A&H was particularly impressive as they had live tracks playing through the D-Live and GLD consoles, so you could actually mix a show to headphones. Cool idea. Yamaha also had a huge exhibition area, unfortunately mostly filled with instruments. I did eventually find one of the live performance stages had a Yamaha CL which I managed to look at in some detail.</p><p></p><p>Although I really tried to like the Digico S21, there is a lot of value for the price, the UI struck me as slow and imprecise. Maybe because I do a lot of rock climbing and have callouses on my finger tips I found the touch screens awkward to use. A stylus may help. It seems to me that trying to touch a specific area on a screen is more error prone than pressing a button or turning a dial. There is something tactile and specific about a button that suits my work style. Since another one of our engineers has similar issues when using an Ipad, a console that required use of a touch screen was not an optimal choice for us. Great console at its price point, but not a good fit.</p><p></p><p>The A&H Dlive was next and it is really impressive. Even the baby brother of the line, the S3000 is superbly packaged. Whereas the Digico UI puzzled and confused me, the DLive is a console you can walk up to and mix on within minutes. It's really intuitive. Mapping of inputs to channels and channels to faders took a minute or two to understand, and there were some touch screen gremlins, but at that point, you can lay out the console however you want. Effects are easy to use, sounded great (on headphones at least) and are easy to bring into the mix. Much like the predecessor ILive, the DLive consoles are just controllers, all the DSP is in the stage box, meaning each console requires one. However, the inverse is not true - a stage box can be used by itself via an Ipad. Cool idea for small shows. Unfortunately A&H is not currently offering an iDR0 size stage box for the DLive for situations where two consoles are sharing inputs. This is an omission they really need to correct. For me, the need to buy two consoles and two stage boxes puts the DLive out of my budget. But, and this is where it's priceless having factory reps standing there in the booth to explain the details, the GLD series of consoles do not need a stage box, their processing is internal, and they can share the DLive's inputs via an Ace card. So now a Dlive at FOH and a GLD80 on Monitors is starting to look promising. But how is the GLD on monitors? Much better then I expected. In the documentation, the GLD looks a bit plastic somehow, the smaller weaker brother to the DLive. Maybe a bit better then the QU, but only just? In person however it is as impressive as the DLive, albeit downsized and not as flashy. It's heavy, solid, intuitive and professional. Functionally its on par with the ILive, 48khz sampling and similar channel counts, in a slightly smaller, updated package. Again, having live tracks playing through the console was a huge help in getting a sense for the work flow when running monitors. I put 8 auxes and a cue wedge on right side fader group, and had 24 inputs on the left. Press the Mix and Solo buttons on an Aux and start bringing up the channels to build the mix. Easy. Usually you would press Mix on an Aux Master fader and start bringing up the channels into that Aux. On a GLD and a DLive I think, you can do it the opposite way. Press the Mix button on an input, the Aux master faders all go to zero, and you start bringing up the aux master faders mixing that input into that aux. My one gripe here is that it's easy to forget you are in Mix mode and start goofing with something else. The Mix buttons do have a blue LED, but it really needs to blink or be brighter. The one shortcoming of the DLive GLD pairing is that the analog preamp gain is only controlled from the DLive. The GLD has +/- 20db of digital trim, but can't change the preamp setting. The workaround I think is to have an IPad at monitor world that can connect to either console. This gives the monitor guy some access, if the FOH guy is awol during sound check.</p><p></p><p>I need to spend some more time with the Yamaha CL and QL consoles before I can come to a conclusion. The CL is capable and solid, but may be too expensive for me. The QL looks promising.</p><p></p><p>After being shunned by the Midas guys, I am less inclined to go out of my way to test drive a Pro2.</p><p></p><p>News to follow.</p><p>Cheers,</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Simon Coffin, post: 147708, member: 388"] Re: Digital Console purchase for a 400 capacity theater Greetings everyone, Time for an update now that I am finally back from NAMM. The snow storm in the North East rattled my flight plans and led to an unplanned extra 3 nights in LA. It's hard to complain about being stuck when temps are in the 70s, skies are sunny and the beaches go on for miles, so I won't. The accountants will however. Just a thought about NAMM first. While there is more equipment to see and play with then the average human would ever need, exhibitors are definitely in two categories. Some are there to present their products, do show and tells, discuss the details, talk to users or potential users. Others are there only to sell. Unfortunately Music Group was amongst the latter. While they had the largest booth by far, a sleek, modern, two level palace in shiny white, complete with live music, snacks and cute girls in tight skirts serving Martinis, they had exactly one piece of equipment on display, a Midas Pro-X console. Nothing else. If you were a distributor and wanted to buy a couple dozen, "Come on in.". If you were Clair Brothers or Rat Sound or a large regional provider, "Come on in." If you were just an audio engineer trying to learn about and compare equipment in order to make an informed purchase, "Nope, can't help you." After flying across the country to see their products, I was less than impressed. Luckily Allen & Heath and Digico had all their products on display, plugged in and working with a staff of factory and regional reps to answer questions. A&H was particularly impressive as they had live tracks playing through the D-Live and GLD consoles, so you could actually mix a show to headphones. Cool idea. Yamaha also had a huge exhibition area, unfortunately mostly filled with instruments. I did eventually find one of the live performance stages had a Yamaha CL which I managed to look at in some detail. Although I really tried to like the Digico S21, there is a lot of value for the price, the UI struck me as slow and imprecise. Maybe because I do a lot of rock climbing and have callouses on my finger tips I found the touch screens awkward to use. A stylus may help. It seems to me that trying to touch a specific area on a screen is more error prone than pressing a button or turning a dial. There is something tactile and specific about a button that suits my work style. Since another one of our engineers has similar issues when using an Ipad, a console that required use of a touch screen was not an optimal choice for us. Great console at its price point, but not a good fit. The A&H Dlive was next and it is really impressive. Even the baby brother of the line, the S3000 is superbly packaged. Whereas the Digico UI puzzled and confused me, the DLive is a console you can walk up to and mix on within minutes. It's really intuitive. Mapping of inputs to channels and channels to faders took a minute or two to understand, and there were some touch screen gremlins, but at that point, you can lay out the console however you want. Effects are easy to use, sounded great (on headphones at least) and are easy to bring into the mix. Much like the predecessor ILive, the DLive consoles are just controllers, all the DSP is in the stage box, meaning each console requires one. However, the inverse is not true - a stage box can be used by itself via an Ipad. Cool idea for small shows. Unfortunately A&H is not currently offering an iDR0 size stage box for the DLive for situations where two consoles are sharing inputs. This is an omission they really need to correct. For me, the need to buy two consoles and two stage boxes puts the DLive out of my budget. But, and this is where it's priceless having factory reps standing there in the booth to explain the details, the GLD series of consoles do not need a stage box, their processing is internal, and they can share the DLive's inputs via an Ace card. So now a Dlive at FOH and a GLD80 on Monitors is starting to look promising. But how is the GLD on monitors? Much better then I expected. In the documentation, the GLD looks a bit plastic somehow, the smaller weaker brother to the DLive. Maybe a bit better then the QU, but only just? In person however it is as impressive as the DLive, albeit downsized and not as flashy. It's heavy, solid, intuitive and professional. Functionally its on par with the ILive, 48khz sampling and similar channel counts, in a slightly smaller, updated package. Again, having live tracks playing through the console was a huge help in getting a sense for the work flow when running monitors. I put 8 auxes and a cue wedge on right side fader group, and had 24 inputs on the left. Press the Mix and Solo buttons on an Aux and start bringing up the channels to build the mix. Easy. Usually you would press Mix on an Aux Master fader and start bringing up the channels into that Aux. On a GLD and a DLive I think, you can do it the opposite way. Press the Mix button on an input, the Aux master faders all go to zero, and you start bringing up the aux master faders mixing that input into that aux. My one gripe here is that it's easy to forget you are in Mix mode and start goofing with something else. The Mix buttons do have a blue LED, but it really needs to blink or be brighter. The one shortcoming of the DLive GLD pairing is that the analog preamp gain is only controlled from the DLive. The GLD has +/- 20db of digital trim, but can't change the preamp setting. The workaround I think is to have an IPad at monitor world that can connect to either console. This gives the monitor guy some access, if the FOH guy is awol during sound check. I need to spend some more time with the Yamaha CL and QL consoles before I can come to a conclusion. The CL is capable and solid, but may be too expensive for me. The QL looks promising. After being shunned by the Midas guys, I am less inclined to go out of my way to test drive a Pro2. News to follow. Cheers, [/QUOTE]
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