Page 1 of 3 >>
"The M-480’s user interface is as navigable and user-friendly as any I’ve ever seen, and is a true joy to work with."
Roland Systems Group has enjoyed great success with its M-series digital mixers for several years now. These consoles leverage the breakthrough technology of the Roland Ethernet Audio Communication (REAC) network protocol, which facilitates the use of a single Cat5e or Cat6 cable to transfer as many as 40 channels of signals from stage to front-of-house and up to 40 return paths from front-of-house to stage.
As the guy in charge of sound for a portable church, I find an Ethernet cable is a very welcome alternative to a heavy, unwieldy, inch-and-a-half diameter analog snake that must be uncoiled and recoiled every Sunday morning. I have had experience with the RSG S-4000 digital snake (even with an analog console) and also RSG’s M-48 personal monitor mixers prior, and in the process, I’ve gotten my hands on an M-400 digital mixer once before. I truly enjoyed the experience and found myself very impressed with the capabilities of the system. So I was excited to get a look at the M-480.
Through the paces
The mixer configuration for my church service was very simple. As a matter of fact, I sat down with the M-480 system on the Saturday afternoon prior to the Sunday service I’d earmarked for evaluating it, thinking I’d need to set up a lot of patch bay signal routing, insertion of EQs and dynamics, and setting up reverb and delay sends. To the contrary, I discovered that the mixer came with pretty much everything pre-configured in an obvious and useful way—no surprises. The only changes I had to make involved monitor sends that fed transmitters at our front-of-house location. I just had to direct them to physical outputs built into the console for connection to the transmitters. On Sunday morning, I rolled out a Cat5e snake, plugged it into the REAC port on the console and at the D-1608 stage box, and then my stage crew started plugging in mics and DIs on stage. I could see the LEDs lighting up on the stage box from front-of-house as I applied phantom power to them, and I started seeing signal on the console’s metering.
I had high expectations based on my prior exposure to the previously released M-400, and my expectations were met. As a matter of course, I invariably chose to dig into functions and devices I normally evaluate without consulting the documentation first, to find out if it’s plausible to get full functionality out of the system in a simple and straightforward manner—my “Simple Enough For a Volunteer” test. I was well into my mix, complete with EQ, dynamics processing, effects sends, and monitor mixes before I consulted the manual with any questions.
The M-480 is based on a newly developed mixing engine that provides, on each input channel, a four-band fully parametric EQ, gate, compressor, and delay. For that matter, every output channel of the console also has a delay available. One major upgrade from the M-400 is the addition of six stereo returns, and the other big step up is cascade-ability—facilitating the capacity to connect two M-480s together to arrive at 96 channels of mixing and advanced synchronization of internal buses. The kicker for me was that it only takes a single Cat5 cable to connect the two consoles. That’s impressive. The console’s primary output is an LCR bus, and internally, the console sports 16 auxiliaries and eight matrices. For my church’s simple configuration, this goes well beyond our needs, but on the other hand, it would be nice to have a separate output mix for recording services, and even more importantly, more than the four auxiliaries we currently have for monitor mixing. I’ve had as many as 10 musicians and vocalists performing at once, so a substantial chunk of the 16 available auxiliaries could be used up pretty quickly, come to think of it. The remaining six could start to go pretty quickly as well, with the effects available on board the M-480.
Page 1 of 3 next page >>
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.
Post a Comment
ADD NEW COMMENT