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There was a time in the not-so-distant past when live sound engineers viewed digital consoles with a very healthy measure of skepticism. Perhaps these concerns arose from having been bitten one too many times by a mixer that capriciously decided to throw every mic on stage wide open while the engineer was 100 feet away and couldn’t grab the master. Or maybe a major computer crash 20 seconds before curtain ruined just one too many days. And in those early days, the uncertainty in digital consoles wasn’t always founded in such extreme calamities. We all grew up with at least a fader, pan pot and mute switch for each channel, and we all had an initial moment of befuddlement—“how do I mix 48 channels with only eight faders?”—and that befuddlement actually dissolved into some disdain even after we used these mixers for a while.
Fast-forward to the present. We have learned to live with fewer faders than channels, and the manufacturers have tried to meet us in the middle with control surfaces that feel a lot more conventional. And now we all nod and agree that life would be very difficult without snapshots and plug-ins. We believe in digital mixers, and there are some awesome digital mixers available. UK-based DiGiCo has introduced its SD8, an addition to a line that includes the popular D1 and D5, and more recently, the SD7. The SD8 is a sophisticated console that touts some pretty nice features. I recently got up close and personal with one and learned a lot about it.
Dissection of an SD8
Internally, the SD8 handles all processing with “Super FPGA” floating point processing—a feature not found in any other console under $50,000, except Digico’s own SD7 model. The mathematical precision facilitated by floating point processing creates massive headroom and vastly improves the quality of the sound over fixed point processing, and it does make a huge difference. Mathematically, floating point processing facilitates insane amounts of headroom—in the thousands of dB—making clipping virtually impossible (inside the console that is—once the signal returns to the “real world” it can certainly clip and distort). But the more important thing is the internal mathematical precision of floating point processing: it simply renders a much higher quality audio signal. Floating point precision is standard on consoles that cost substantially more money, so a key part of the story here is that DiGiCo provides it in a sub-$50K console.
The SD8 has 60 stereo or mono channels available (the equivalent of 120 channels of DSP)—plenty for most churches—and certain key functions are available on all channels all the time, in contrast with some digital consoles that don’t offer consistent processing on all channels. Specifically, each channel sports a compressor, gate, four-band parametric EQ, 24-dB, high-pass and low-pass filters, and up to 1.3 seconds of delay. The console’s user interface features 37 motorized faders, which felt great to the touch—very smooth and solid. One particularly slick fader convention is the “center detent” that DiGiCo’s engineers have achieved. When the faders are used as controls for one of the console’s 12 included graphic equalizers, they have this detent at mid-scale, just like the physical graphic EQs we’ve come to know and love. This is accomplished with the faders’ servomotors, and is an excellent example of the detail that DiGiCo devoted to the user interface.
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John McJunkin is the CEO of Avalon Podcasting in Chandler, Arizona, which offers high quality podcast production and consultation services to a broad range of clients. He’s also the host of the Podcast Pro Tech & Tips Podcast at www.avalonpodcasting.com.
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