A Great Advantage of Digital Sound Boards: Memory

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 06:00:00 +0000

Digital consoles are not new and have been around for some time in the touring/live sound and other larger-production scale industries in the form of the PM5’s, M7C’s, and LS9’s from Yamaha for example. These desks were very advanced in form and power compared to their analog contemporaries and also required a substantial investment to match. Improvements in costs and manufacturing at the center of this technology have made it possible for these consoles to take on new lesser expensive forms in smaller more familiar-sized desks that we might see in every day life.

There are several advantages to the benefits of having digital control, processing, and memory integrated into an audio mixing console. The “advantage scale” certainly tips in favor of the digital console but one quality in particular seems to carry the most weight with many of our customers.

The most common problem we hear about from our church clients, for example, have to do with ongoing changes and adjustments to an existing analog console and how, after time, the system’s original clarity and strength have changed, or now some microphones have changed and begun to ring and feed back randomly into the system. Essentially, after time, and with various random adjustments from use, some of their settings have moved so far out of favor that our phone rings and now its time to set up another service call to readjust and realign the system or specific channels for improved clarity and performance. Wouldn’t it be great if the board could just remember what those favorite settings were?

Enter the digital console and memory. A console that actually remembers your last saved or favorite settings for a particular channel or output is almost priceless! “Consistency is king!” No matter how far out some adjustments could be on a particular channel, setting, or output, for whatever reason, with just a few button pushes, and perhaps a drop-down menu, those original settings can be restored in a flash. Entire scenes of settings can also be stored so they can be recalled anytime in the future.

Memory in a digital sound board makes it possible to preserve all the work a sound person does at the console. No matter if it was a violin, an acoustic guitar, a saxophone, or a particular brand of microphone that was just plugged in once into the system, a name can be given to that setting and stored for future use. Many consoles also feature pre-engineered settings for a variety of possible instruments and mics that can be “pasted” into a channel for quick set-up. Or, if in the last minute you also needed to move an existing instrument or mic setting from one channel to another, a “copy” and “paste” function “moves” all that work to the new channel to streamline the work flow and save time.

Joe Rodriguez
Sales and Installations Coordinator
joe@mundtmusic.com
903-758- 8872

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A Great Advantage of Digital Sound Boards: Memory