Re: Replacing the Presonus 16.4.2 - suggestions please
The issue is a standardized configuration with which external users will also be familiar. The local band playing one night at a church with their own person mixing, the high school or theatre troupe tech doing a performance at a local community theater, the corporate tech running a presentation or panel discussion at an off campus site, etc. Those users often need to be able to use a system with little or no advance configuration or training which means having to start with a configuration that they can easily understand and familiarize themselves with in advance.
With analog mixers all such users usually needed to know was what was connected to what inputs and outputs, if you had subgroups and how they were assigned, etc. That still works for some digital mixer configurations, but others are much more difficult to document and explain especially to someone that may have limited familiarity with a particular mixer or digital mixers in general.
What I have found is that what is best for a default external user configuration is often quite different than the preferred configuration for regular internal users. For example, you may normally split microphones across layers based on typical use or only use part of a layer for mics with the rest for other commonly used sources but having the mics in numerical order on layers may work better for someone wanting a 'default' configuration. Or you may assign certain mic inputs you use a lot to the first inputs and then skip to others, putting those that may physically or numerically be in between but are used less often on other layers, while a default setup may want to keep the microphones all in some logical or numerical order.
A simple example from a lecture hall was that for typical use they wanted the mixer programmed for left and right lectern mics, then the 'room' wireless mics then miscellaneous mics such as the other 6 wired mic inputs at the front of the room. But for a default setup for outside users it might make more sense to have all 8 of the wired mic inputs in order house left to right (which also happen to be numbered 1-8) as inputs 1-8 then the 'room' wireless mics. But either way, an external user needs to know what they are walking into.
And I apologize for getting Phil's thread so far off his original topic.
