Bastard Digital Desks & live rack effects!

[molan]

I stepped in as a dep sound engineer for the evening and the regular engineer lent the band his Yamaha 01V digital desk, a bloody great stack of effects & equalisers, compressors etc & lights with a Martin controller.

He said he'd label up all the interconnects so they'd be really easy to use and that the desk was very intuitive to use.

Once we arrived and got all the stuff out we discovered about a zillion leads with massively ambiguous labelling.

Managed to get the hang of the desk and got all the incoming feeds working into my monitor headphones. However, try as we might we could only get a single feed out to one channel of the monitors. No FoH, sod all volume from the single monitor that worked and nothing feeding into the stupidly complex lighting controller.

6 of us tried just about every combination but got absolutely nowhere.

Luckily there was a support act that had a good old fashioned Yamaha analogue powered desk. Took me about 5 minutes to get it up & running with a nice FoH sound & two monitor mixes. No eq on the monitors so volume was a bit of a problem but FoH sounded fine.

The the bloody monitors blew - pretty sure they had fuses in them & the pair went simultaneously midway through the second set. They really weren't all that loud because of the full range signal they were getting.

Because the support act also had a pair of FoH speakers I managed to rig these up as side fills from the monitor mix and got a decent on stage sound.

Anyway - the point of this rant is that the band only ever play small venues and a simple analogue desk with on-board effects & maybe a pair of 'set em & forget em' graphics is easily enough for sort of gigs they get. A basic set of coloured PAR cans would be fine as well. So why does the sound guy have this huge array of equipment - apparently he often has problems with things crashing, especially the lighting controller. It must take 2-3 times as long to set it all up & break down again as well. . .

[joegarcia]

Surely the point of digital desks is to do away with all the excessive outboard? Never used a O1V live though, are they any good for live stuff or are they studio desks really? I get on pretty well with the LS9 and M7CL, particularly for monitor work. Digital desks are great in some situations but that just sounds totally ridiculous.

[molan]

[quote name='joegarcia' post='903898' date='Jul 24 2010, 12:03 PM']Surely the point of digital desks is to do away with all the excessive outboard? Never used a O1V live though, are they any good for live stuff or are they studio desks really? I get on pretty well with the LS9 and M7CL, particularly for monitor work. Digital desks are great in some situations but that just sounds totally ridiculous.[/quote]
Totally agree the desk has loads of assignable effects so why have a huge rack of outboard kit!

It seemed pretty flexible but the nature of digital with pads having multi functions isn't anywhere near as fast for fixing things on the fly.

Personally I'd go analogue every time for genuine usable flexibility.

[escholl]

The 01V is a nightmare anyway, to do anything on that desk involves reading a tiny screen, nothing is intuitive, and on the one I used, the clip indicator was set higher than the clipping threshold of the pre's -- brilliant.

[joegarcia]

[quote name='molan' post='904017' date='Jul 24 2010, 02:13 PM']Totally agree the desk has loads of assignable effects so why have a huge rack of outboard kit!

It seemed pretty flexible but the nature of digital with pads having multi functions isn't anywhere near as fast for fixing things on the fly.

Personally I'd go analogue every time for genuine usable flexibility.[/quote]

Absolutely. With extra outboard you're just going through another set of D/A A/D convertors anyway.