Behringer X32 - Audio Media

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FEATURE 38 October 2012 | audiomedia.com “Overall, quality is clearly paramount for all of these manufacturers, be it through reviving the old analogue sounds of yesteryear through plug-ins or using other new technologies” Paul Watson Due Process? Effects Processing Inside The Console Paul Watson talks to four of the many manufacturers now putting their internal effects forward as a one of the big reasons to buy. What philosophies populate this hard-fought piece of ground? “W explains Brand Development Manager e write all our own effects algorithms, because all of our digital consoles operate an automatic latency management routine,” at Midas, Richard Ferriday. “It’s very important that however the operator deploys those effects processors, the console is able to manage the resulting latencies and make sure that the audio is always in phase, right down to single sample accuracy, whenever they sum that audio together at any point.” The company philosophy in terms of its effects and processing, Ferriday says, is to continually improve them: after purchasing a console, any new effects that are built into the software are always released to the customer at no extra cost. “If you take our latest Generation II software as an example, which we released at ProLight + Sound earlier this year, that added lots of new functionality into our entire console range,” he continues. “We added an additional five reverbs, a dynamic EQ, a matrix mixer, several additional modulation effects, and a new tapdelay.” Because Midas’s digital consoles all boast identical effects and processing options, from the Pro 1 all the way up to the XL8, the manufacturer can provide full compatibility across the board, so to speak. “Uniquely, you can take a show file from any one of our consoles with a certain effects rack as a component in that show file and it will load onto any of our other consoles, and run perfectly,” Ferriday states. “Although we’ll always continue to develop our palette of effects units, we also appreciate that there’ll always be something that someone is going to want that we won’t be able to provide – an effect that perhaps 99 per cent of our customers will never use – so we have made it easy to interface our consoles with external DSP resources so users can run an effect on a laptop and interface it specifically with the console whenever they need to.” DiGiCo One manufacturer that uses more than just DSP is DiGiCo: unlike any other brand, it uses Super Field “Anyone else that can interact with Waves has an Ethernet connector to a SoundGrid server, whereas we offer that capability via a 2U rack-mount [SoundGrid] server, and everything else is then incorporated into the console...” Dave Webster, DiGiCo Programmable Gate Array (Super FPGA) for all its audio path. “DSP is certainly powerful, but nowhere near as powerful as Super FPGA,” claims DiGiCo’s marketing director, David Webster. “What that means is, when you’re dealing with something that needs a lot of arithmetic calculations, like a reverb, you can get a much higher quality out of Super FPGA. In the old days, for your house vocal, you’d have either your Lexicon 224 or 480, or your Yamaha SPX 90 – now when you look at that, they’re both reverbs, but I know which one I’d want! Plenty of manufacturers can deliver quality similar to something like the SPX 90, but using Super FPGA, we can provide the quality of the Lexicon – and you can really hear the difference.” Something else that DiGiCo doesn’t need to worry about, Webster says, is clogging up the I/O on the console with effects returns. “With an SD7, because of the Super FPGA and the DSP together, we can do up to 48 stereo effects – just returns on a console you’d need 96 inputs for that,” he smiles. “And that’s excluding any of the compressors, dynamic EQs and gates, because they’re on every channel and every bus of our consoles anyway.” Webster stresses that although all DiGiCo customers are happy with the internal effects and processing DIGICO/WAVES SOUNDGRID The DiGiCo SoundGrid module provides instant access to up to 16 fully integrated low-latency Waves stereo processor racks (32 I/O) on the SD8 and SD9, and up to 32 (64 I/O) on the SD7, using Super FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology that links directly via Ethernet to the SD7, SD8, or SD9’s digital mixing engine. SoundGrid is pre-loaded with Waves SoundGridcompatible plug-ins, and other features include total snapshot integration, redundancy and recovery via SoundGrid, and touch & turn plug-in control.
available in its consoles, the manufacturer realises that people will always have their personal preferences in the way something should sound, therefore offers plug-in capability, via Waves. “Is it the Waves DSP add-on? Yes and no, really. It is, but anyone else that can interact with Waves has an Ethernet connector to a SoundGrid server, whereas we offer that capability via a 2U rack-mount [SoundGrid] server, and everything else is then incorporated into the console as standard,” Webster explains. “Using DiGiCo, you can have up to 32 stereo racks from Waves – that’s 64 channels. Most other people aren’t able to do that... We are the only manufacturer that allows that 64 I/O on top of any I/O we have in any of our consoles.” DiGiCo also offers control of Waves via its consoles’ touch-screens, which eliminates the need for an additional PC. “Instead of a running a separate laptop, you’re basically running a separate server for audio only, and it uniquely saves that within a session. The only thing that’s happening is its number-crunching and the audio I/O is going in and out of the 2U box; everything else all happens within the console,” Webb reveals. “It’s then saved as a Waves live session file with a DiGiCo session file – the two are married. So, for example, say Eric Clapton’s using a particular effect and you change it for his guitar solo in Layla, that’s there, even though it’s in Waves; the console knows it, and it tells the Waves box what it wants, then you see it on the screen on the console. It’s totally integrated, whereas everybody else has to run it as if it’s a separate piece of outboard gear.” Soundcraft One of the benefits of being part of the Harman Group, says Soundcraft’s Head of Digital Console Strategy, Andy Brown, is being able to utilise the best of all of its brands, which has had a positive impact on the effects and processing that’s gone into Soundcraft’s Vi and Si ranges of digital consoles. “We are in a very good position as we have access to lots of well known and well-respected brands, going from the Lexicon reverbs to the dynamic stuff like BSS graphics and dbx processing,” he says. “Our general philosophy is to “We added an additional five reverbs, a dynamic EQ, a matrix mixer, several additional modulation effects, and a new tapdelay.y...” Richard Ferriday, Midas try and get those brands into our consoles, and although we have certainly done that in our current offering, there’s a lot we’d like to do on that side of things. What’s also really cool is that these fellow-Harman brands also happen to be industry standard – brands that engineers would have on their wish-list when speaking to any digital console manufacturer. That’s a big bonus for us.” Using Lexicon, Brown says, was “a complete no-brainer”: “Being such a super-respected brand – probably the leading brand in the industry at one time – meant we had to put it into our Vi and Si consoles; we got a very positive reaction from engineers and I think it made people remember just how well made those original audiomedia.com | November 2012 39 >
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