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DiGiCo’s Live Digital Mixing Consoles
Although DiGiCo’s live digital mixing consoles have only been in existence for four years, the product line has been going for 10 years with the live range having been developed from Soundtracs’ digital studio desks.
The portfolio now includes the D5 Live, D1 Live, D5T/12 for permanent installations such as theatre and worship facilities and live events from corporate functions to rock ‘n roll concerts whilst the DS-00 and D4 digital mixing consoles have full automation for post-production facilities, live on air broadcasts and monitoring functions.
One of the big advantages of these consoles is that they all have a common design from the DSP engine to the surface interface. They all run MADI, OptoCore, or both and file formats are the same, allowing sessions to be easily swapped or shared between consoles. This means that once an engineer knows how to work one console in the range, any other will be instantly familiar.
The original surface concept of Soundtracs’ consoles was deliberately designed to be simple and easy to use and, due to this good initial design, has changed little over the last eight years - although below the surface many changes and refinements have taken place - with the emphasis always being on allowing engineers to get their job done quickly and easily.
Efficient DSP engine design and coding means that DiGiCo products achieve more channels/buses per processor than any other manufacturer. Using floating point processors gives vastly increased headroom and a system that is almost impossible to clip: up to 40 bits can be processed, meaning that even low frequency signals maintain their integrity.
As previously mentioned, all DiGiCo consoles use either MADI or OptoCore optical connections. The latter provides a stable means of transferring up to 512 channels in a redundant loop, over distances in excess of 1000 metres.
DiGiCo is the only company that employs Gain Tracking™ to allow up to four consoles to share the same inputs/house racks without affecting each other’s gain structure, having to have splitters, or change from digital to analogue. This is ideal for the live environment where there may be a front of house and monitor console, mobile broadcast and recording unit.
DiGiCo consoles also have a different approach for accessing channels: whilst many products provide controls for a single channel accessed by a channel select key, DiGiCo consoles provide a visual indication of what is happening on all the console’s faders. For example EQ, Dynamics, gain, pan, etc have dedicated controls for each block of eight channels.
With the exception of the I/O racks, DiGiCo consoles are a one-box solution, giving the minimum number of connections and allowing engineers to turn up, turn on and mix. The I/O is housed in a remote DiGiRACK - which is a standard size of only 9U and provides full redundancy both in terms of power supply and the racks themselves - minimising the issue of signal degradation from sources such as microphones. The use of the 150-metre fibre optic drum also eliminates the need for bulky multicore snakes.
The common interface of the I/O – MADI or OptoCore – provides a seamless interface between boxes and gives up to 224 inputs and 224 outputs for any format including ADAT, AES/EBU, Tdif, Aviom, Ether Sound and D-TuBe. And with the latest interface box, MADI to Pro Tools HD without the need for any external I/O.
Offline software allows preparation to be done on an off-site computer, allowing huge savings on set up times.
DiGiCo has always made its consoles future upgradeable, as with new V4 upgrade package for the live and recording, broadcast and post production consoles due for general release Early 2007.
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