The British-born audio engineer was beloved by musicians for his designs, which included preamplifiers and mixing consoles. Audio engineers use soundboards to shape the sound of a recording in the studio, says Susan Rogers, a professor at Berklee College of Music, who worked as a record producer and studio engineer for Prince, Barenaked Ladies, David Byrne and others.
This is what made the Neve boards so special, Rogers says. But back in those days, an audio engineer had to be a sound sculptor who could make those correct decisions in the moment when you have a band on the other side of the glass. So, what do you do? Get them all together again and rerecord? Very expensive, difficult. You can have that low, fat bass. Grohl actually bought that Neve board from Sound City Studios. Using eight! Likewise, functionality of standard mixing equipment for production sound saw few advances, except for much-needed improvements to amplifier technology primarily in relation to problems due to microphonics in early tube designs.
Re-recording consoles, however, began to see some changes, mostly in regards to equalization. Some studios began increasing the count of dubbers as well, which required an increase in the number of inputs required.
For the most part, though, the basic operations of film sound recording and re-recording remained as they were in the previous decade. While the introduction of magnetic recording significantly improved the quality of sound recording, it would remain for Stefan Kudelski to introduce the first truly lightweight battery-operated recorder capable of high-quality recording, based on the recorders that he originally designed for broadcast field recording.
This was a complete game-changer, and eliminated the need for a sprocketed film recorder or studio tape machine to be located off-set somewhere frequently in a truck , with the attendant need for and AC power or bulky battery boxes and inverters. Not only did this equipment require a significant source of power for operation, they were, by nature, heavy and bulky as a result of the power transformers and audio transformers that were a standard feature of all vacuum tube audio designs.
In addition, they produced a lot of heat! Again, all of vacuum tube design. A common trait amongst all of these designs was that nearly all of them were four input mixers. The only EQ provided was a switchable LF rolloff or high-pass filter.
There were typically, no pads or first stage mic preamp gain trim controls. The mic preamps typically had a significant amount of gain, required to compensate for the low output of most of the ribbon and dynamic mics utilized in film production at the time while condenser mics existed, they also tended to have relatively low output as well.
All had rotary faders, usually made by Daven. Re-recording consoles were of course much larger, with more facilities for equalization and other signal processing, but even these consoles seldom had more than eight to twelve inputs per section.
Power amplifiers and speaker systems had somewhat improved, boosting the performance of cinema reproduction. It was during this period that technologies developed for music and broadcast began to seep into the area of film sound, and the approach to console designs began to change. This opened up a significant range of possibilities that had not existed before. With the introduction of solid-state condenser mics, designers began to incorporate microphone powering as part their overall design approach to production mixers, which eliminated the need for cumbersome outboard power supplies.
More complex and better sounding algorithms are developed, offering higher sound quality then ever before. Equally important, however, is the user interface, which makes the huge range of DSP functions available to the operator. The more functionality a digital live mixing console offers, the more challenging it becomes for the sound engineer to control and manage it all.
Also, the way an algorithm is presented - e. In other words, the user interface is part of the sound algorithm. Supporting a good overview with an efficient workflow to get to the details of a channel strip fast and accurately, as well as supporting creative decision-making in a chaotic live concert environment through a carefully designed user interface, are the key things to look for when selecting a digital mixing console.
0コメント