Well, the shipping company is picking up the four rolling cases today and I'm officially done with this Road Test. Sure hate to see it go!
There's something undefinable about the sound of this latest gig and I think it's that the spoken word had more immediacy--that it was less distant-sounding and more up front. Even with a mass of parametric EQ cuts on the lavalier subgroup the sound of the Venue D-Show Profile was the most "in your face" I've ever had in this room or with this PA. I don't know why this would be true because the limiting and compression on channels and mixes this time around was within the norm for me using any other digital mixer. It's true that the Profile's standard onboard and 3rd party plug-ins were different than normal but even on mixes that didn't involve a strong plug-in compression or limiting effect the sound was placed well forward... Even my talkback mic routed straight to the PA had this character. Basically, the show sounded more like a well-produced voice over than a little guy lost on a big stage.
By 'undefinable' I don't mean hard to hear. The guys I usually gig with on the crew this time were telling me how much better it sounded than last time. Sure, it wasn't a true ABX test but even the 55-ish motorcycle guy who admits of hearing loss was saying positive things.
Here's a couple of snaps of the corporate meeting FOH setup. Playback at the desk consisted of my laptop, an Instant Replay and an aging CD player that skipped whenever anybody on the platform moved.
I pulled that guy out of the Profile's top layer on the first day and inserted a surprise DVCam video playback unit. Notice that my stereo playback channels are old-skool dual fader style... On the Profile I am able to map these stereo sources to a single fader which makes for a tighter top layer with more stuff visible but in this case the source material was going to be coming at me last minute and was going to be all over the place in terms of production quality. I was certain to get 'stereo' video tapes that had only one channel activated or had completely different quality on each channel; in the end my fear was proven correct. That's why I kept my stereo sources on two faders... I also made sure the pan knobs were in view any time I was playing back a crummy video tape or home-burnt DVD. You can see in the bottom photo the hard-panned character of the DVD inputs. Those green LED circles surrounding the rotary encoders can also show things like input trim, HPF, comp or gate threshold and delay but I need to be able to quickly pan a bad tape's good channel straight up and drop the bad channel fader's level.
The white board tape you see is for my tech director who covered for me a couple of times while I took a quick bio.
I don't need board tape to tell me the same things that the orange alphanumeric display shows.
I noticed that the two mic inputs at FOH aren't quite as good quality as the 48 mic inputs on the Stage Rack. The FOH Rack has one 15v phantom powered mic input labeled COM--I used that for a push-to-talk Shure MX-418 mic that the tech director spoke into for VOG announcements. The Profile surface itself has a 15v talkback input at the upper right corner... I found that my SM58 talkback mic had some underlying buzz and the Shure MX-418 was a hair too hot for the FOH rack COM input even with its six-step gain knob turned all the way down to -32dBu. I'd like to see an optional card that puts some high quality mic pres into the FOH Rack. All the line level inputs at FOH were perfectly acceptable.
One essential area where I didn't have enough time to explore was the Profile filing and snapshot system. The mark of a really usable mixer is that the filing system is flexible yet fool-proof. Can you load parts of the next band's show while the first band is still on stage? I didn't check that out. Can you protect parts of your mix from new snapshot recalls? Can you store snapshots of only selected sections of your mix? Can you copy or store the EQ and dynamics of a channel without copying or storing its subgroup/aux routing or input trim? I didn't find out how to do these things because my gig was so frantic and busy with such long hours and very high maintenance clients. Can you move a channel to a different fader and have its plug-ins move with it? Yes, you can! I figured that one out by myself--RTFM.
The onboard EQ shows that it is in circuit with a red status light vs. no light. The onboard dynamics show 'in circuit' with a green status light vs. no light. I think that
both should be green when they are in circuit.
One interesting feature is that if you adjust the dynamics on one channel then separately adjust the dynamics on another, you can select them both and further tweak their dynamics while retaining the relative differences between them. At one point in my gig I needed to find an option that made the second channel's dynamics jump to exactly match the first channel's--I needed to eliminate the relative offset. Simple copy and paste of the whole channel did the trick for dynamics but my EQ settings, subgroup/aux routing and gain trim level was also copied and pasted. At some point I will have to figure out how to copy and paste only EQ or only dynamics on the Profile.
Plug-in Serato parametric 10-filter EQ was my main tool for microphone subgroup anti-feedback processing and output speaker zone processing. I wish I had figured out how to start the EQ with a default filter bandwidth of one-fifth octave instead of always having to trim the default bandwidth down from one whole octave. I'm sure there's a way but I didn't have time during setup to look it up and after the rig was dialed in I didn't need to.
The Profile is the space-saving version of the larger D-Show and in this Road Test setup the USB keyboard and trackball mouse were stored in a sliding shelf underneath the surface. On the bigger D-Show the trackball is on top next to the main fader bank where it's MUCH easier to access. I found it a PITA to push the trackball shelf in and out during my gig yet leaving it out meant that I had to reach farther to get to the faders and knobs. I'm sure if I were gigging steadily with the Profile I would put a mouse shelf permanently on the front off to the right side. The good news is that there is a sturdy slot running the length of the underside of the front of the surface and you can mount a mouse shelf on this slot and lock it down with the same knurled knobs used for locking down the LCD screen on the back of the surface. Lefties can have the trackball on the left if desired... Yesterday, when I was packing the Profile back up for return to Digidesign, I noticed some metal shelves intended for PQ mixers mounted on mic stands--I wondered if one of those shelves would have solved my trackball inconvenience.
Overall, this mixer leaves a fantastic impression on me. It gave me the tools to get a great sound easily.
-Bink