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Analogue & Digital


JamesR

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Dear All,

 

I am student studying a Sound, Light & Live Event Technology course. I am currently gathering information on Analogues & Digital mixing desks.

 

I wondered if people could give their real world opinion on The Pro's & Con's of using Analogue and Digital Mixing desks.

 

A quick list of Pro & Cons of each would be great.

 

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As an addition I have been researching the birth of Analogue desks and I am struggling to pin point an actual year. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

Thank you for all your support.

 

Kind Regards,

 

James

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Your analogue question is a very strange one. You really need to produce a specification for what you consider an analogue 'desk' to mean. The BBC have been mixing sources since 1922, and this date also seems to be the accepted start of American broadcasting to with the first voice stations. Two or three faders makes an analogue desk, doesn't it? Or maybe you would consider the 60s, with the rise of the recording industry your date? Digital desks have been around for a considerable time now too - 1987 or so - so the crossover period is considerable.

 

Opinions won't help much, because just a few years ago, the predominant comments on the subject on this forum were universally negative, then they swung a bit, and now are firmly positive.

 

Generally speaking, new users love digital mixers from the start. Old people, brought up on different technology have resistance to change in different degrees. To get useful opinion, you need to ask structured questions to make the research relevant.

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given Paul's point about analogue over time, to which you can add variations over budget, you also need to consider purpose.

And once your done with that, you need to bear in mind that engineers mix differently and have different preferences if given a free choice - and that ties in with age and purpose.

it's a pretty wide question and it doesn't have straightforward answers.

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There are other practicalities to take into account as well.

 

Many on the forum would be delighted to mix a band on a Heritage 3000 with a nice rack of outboard. However the size, weight, and transport/crew expense means that digital is a far more economical choice for most applications. And that of course has a knock-on effect on the return on investment and resale value. There are a lot of very nice analogue desks going for ridiculously cheap second hand these days - and people still can't sell them.

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Dear All,

 

I appreciate your responses and I realise this is very open questions. I am currently studying in my first year and as a group presentation we have decided to look into both Analogue and Digital mixing desk.

 

We wanted to try and get across to an audience with no prior knowledge the benefits of using Digital over Analogue and verse versa. I suppose in a way I want the opinions of both younger and older engineers. Comparing life with analogue on the road with all its outboard racks and then people who use digital. I am looking for real life opinions, no matter how different.

 

We have looked into the history of both desks and found the birth of digital to be around 1981 produced by AMS Neve. A Neve DSP-1. I am currently unable to found datez for the birth of Analogue in live audio.

 

Kind Regards,

 

James

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You'll continue to struggle finding the earliest sound mixer because they've been around as long as there's been radio or TV (or electronic rather than practical effects in theatres. I'm going to guess the earliest ones were in the 1920s but it depends what you consider a mixer. This page has some old stuff: http://www.cinephonics.co.uk/vintage-sound-equipment

 

The first one I used in a theatre was in 1969/70 and it looked a bit like this: 84a12cd28025353548ae1ca51864e6cb.jpg I couldn't find the exact model but that's similar. Note that for theatre productions we never used microphones The mixer was for sound effects off disk and reel to reel tape.

 

Digital vs. analogue mixers? It's a huge topic. Digital tends to be able to do more for less money and in a smaller space than an analogue mixer with racks of outboard. However, the learning curve to get the best out of a digital mixer tends to be much steeper than analogue. Within reason, any experienced sound person can walk up to an analogue desk and use it. There's less standardisation among digital desks and, with the use of menus, more potential "gotchas". However, once you've got through the learning curve, most of us enjoy the flexibility of digital.

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The earliest radio desks used stud faders and kept the signals balanced throughout. There's some great pictures of Broadcasting House equipment from the 1930s here. Some of these old desks were still in daily use at Wood Norton when I worked there in the late 1960s!
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I spent my Birthday last year looking around the store rooms of the National Media Museum with my friend John - an ex curator of the museum and television historian.

Had chance to play with some of these;

http://i513.photobucket.com/albums/t335/ceddison/Web%20images/78E7B114-7E86-44F1-A9EA-2172D6D32D4D_zpslel4jabp.jpg

 

That's a B-type, with some ugly bald-headed mug in the background. I forget the history of this exact desk, but I know it had only a handful of channels and was engineered like a battleship!

 

http://i513.photobucket.com/albums/t335/ceddison/Web%20images/4C5E4770-2F6B-483E-A80A-2E6493C80ACB_zpsuozjo4ix.jpg

 

 

And that's the same ugly bloke with a Neve DSP-1. The first commercially available digital mixing console.

More info here; http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/collection/television/studioequipment/collectionitem?id=1994-5025

 

It was a fascinating day and if you can ever get to Bradford, I'd very much recommend booking on one of their tours here - it wouldn't quite be the same one-to-one tour that I had, but it'd give you chance to see these items. Might give you some extra marks if you could include some photos of you actually with some of the items you've been writing about.

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We wanted to try and get across to an audience with no prior knowledge the benefits of using Digital over Analogue and verse versa. I suppose in a way I want the opinions of both younger and older engineers. Comparing life with analogue on the road with all its outboard racks and then people who use digital. I am looking for real life opinions, no matter how different.

 

 

 

To an audience of no prior knowledge the single benefit of digital over analogue is simply size and weight I would suggest. Digital being a one box solution. The arguments about sound quality and work flow are probably too esoteric for the target audience.

 

I would also suggest that to a younger engineer,the extra work involved in patching up outboard and having to remember the settings on a two or three band show, or just being left with eight channels for the support act, would fill them with the same horror, that an older engineer would have, having to go back to moving a big analogue desk with all its outboard night after night!

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The reality is that analogue mixing is, to all intents and purposes, a dead technology, and in a few years will be about as relevant as gas mantle streetlamps and film cameras.

 

Just think, if digital mixing had been invented first, and then someone came up with analogue mixing, how hard a sell that would be, all the features that have become the norm simply weren't there in any affordable analogue desk.

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,the extra work involved in patching up outboard and having to remember the settings on a two or three band show,

 

Indeed.

 

Doing tight changeovers at FOH for a festival with a very varied bill, I ended up requisitioning an extra crew member, for the sole task of repatching outboard, whilst I frantically twiddled knobs on the desk to get some semblance of a mix together.

 

It would be interesting to take an objective measurement of how things differ when using digital in that kind of scenario. (Assuming no soundchecks, so no recall available)

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The reality is that analogue mixing is, to all intents and purposes, a dead technology, and in a few years will be about as relevant as gas mantle streetlamps and film cameras.

 

 

 

Don't really agree with this, whilst every one and his auntie will probably use digital, the process of patching up a desk and outboard and a knob for everything is a very good road map for using digital. I still think in terms of where the string is going when doing routing and set ups on digital

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