First, I want to start with praise to the development of 3.0. Very very nice! The response of the faders is so improved.
While 3.0 has a ton more features and is far more flexible than the previous version, there is one thing I just can not believe got left out.
I don't mean to sound negative but this blew my mind....
please hear me out,
The Aux masters
ARE NOT CURRENTLY assignable to a VCA. (Probably should have been named DCA not VCA)
In the event that something terrible happens like really loud feedback in a few monitor mixes or even just one, the engineer almost never knows exactly which mix is causing the feedback.
Once microphone channel 14 starts feeding back into mix 2, any other aux mixes that have channel 14 in it, are also going to now produce the same feedback sounding pitch and cause uncontrollable feedback to rear it's ugly head. Before you know it, people are screaming and holding their ears, but the engineer just wants to go hide somewhere because everyone in the place knows it's his fault, correct? Not so fast....
Couldn't the engineer assign all the aux mix masters to a single mute??? sure.... but assigning all the monitor "speaker" aux mixes to fader (VCA 1 perhaps) and use that as a panic fader to
lower all the aux masters at once in case this happens is much better, No, we don't want to suddenly mute all the monitors, then what, what happens when we "UN-mute them? you guessed it, so when
do we turn them back on? This is why we need to be able to lower all the aux masters for speaker monitor mixes without having to change the level of each and every mix, and then not having a clue as to where they should be put back to. Yes, that would be a very sensible thing to set up, especially with a mixer having 32 channels and 12 monitor mix capability. BUT........ this can not be done because the design folks who made and tested this new stuff did not think or consider this... but let's cut them some slack....maybe they did and just forgot to incorporate it.
I think anything else could have been designed differently, right or wrong, but this is a must have feature for the VCAs.
Agree?
Anyone?,
Anyone? Bueller?
Beno?
Let's say we have 8 drum mics and they are all assigned to VCA 2.
I think,.... when we move the VCA 2 master, all of the drum mic channel faders should visibly move with the movement of the VCA master that they are assigned to.
Maybe it's just me. I think it is ridiculous these days that digital consoles with moving faders and DCAs also do not move like this. In the old days of analog VCAs, the faders did not physically move because they were not motorized and couldn't, so the VCA "electrically" altered the audio in the channel as opposed to actually moving the fader. It sure would have been nice back then to look at the drum mic channels and say "gee, i guess the VCA needs to be turned back up.
And another very very simple silly thing would have been to include a brown and grey color choice since many of us use the standard color code, for fast addressing of things.
1= brown, 2= red, 3= orange, 4= yellow, 5= green, 6= blue, 7= violet, 8= grey, 9= white.
Just by habit all these years for me at least, if I want to lower mix 1 all I have to do is look for the brown Aux master fader for mix 1.... just a silly request.
OK, nice job though
NOW WHERE'S MY DL32R?
thanks for reading and Beno, please take this info to your guys!