Members rangerkarlos Posted December 13, 2014 Members Share Posted December 13, 2014 I get the feeling systems like the Mackie DL32R (or better/worser) are going to become the norm/ standard for PA. What do you think regarding quality, reliability, price, timelines, etc.? If you're like me, technology is so quick even thinking about upgrades is daunting given the rapid pace of developement. What was the once the working bands standard 10 years ago is now the proverbial boat anchor. What does the future hold? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members OneEng Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 Yes, they are the future; however, there is still a very prominent place for a nice physical surface. For those that are willing to afford these, I suspect there will be different types of physical interfaces having different amounts of complexity and features for any price range. For bar bands, the rack mount mixer with remote tablet is a sure bet in my book. Just too inexpensive, small, easy to carry, etc, to not become a success IMHO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members agedhorse Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 It's like the desktop versus pad or phone device, pad is cool for some things but designing products on a pad interface would suck is a very big way. Same for word processing, same for working on spreadsheets, etc. User interface is almost everything these days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members voicemaster Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 Mackie DL32R seems great, but it still only focus on 1 platform which is Ipad and relying solely on wireless connection. The presonus RM32Ai with multiplatform devices capability and also wired connection via cat5 connection will probably more reliable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rangerkarlos Posted December 14, 2014 Author Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 I didn't really mean to be mackie specific. More along the lines of the trends in product design. I know there are decades of experience here and no shortage of opinion. 😜 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Comoxsam Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 How about the digital mixer being built right into the speakers? So your PA system is just speakers and a tablet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rangerkarlos Posted December 14, 2014 Author Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 How about the digital mixer being built right into the speakers? So your PA system is just speakers and a tablet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Kalina2 Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 How about the digital mixer being built right into the speakers? So your PA system is just speakers and a tablet. I think it will be so in the future ..... we lose physical mixer (probably my son would enjoy it) will be sufficient to digital kit (tablet, laptop, mobile phone) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Kalina2 Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 it is possible now Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Audiopyle Sound Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 How about the digital mixer being built right into the speakers? So your PA system is just speakers and a tablet. I think that as long as some kind of signal distribution is needed, a place to plug in mic cables, it will remain more practical to have the mixer in a stage box of some kind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dboomer Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 Plug in cables? 😀 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members OneEng Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 I like the idea of speakers being an all-in-one solution. As eluded to by some here, it would require that the cables dissappear Wireless from mics to speaker. The speaker will never be able to be replaced since it is the source of the sound energy. As all manufactures have found, putting the amplification and DSP into the speaker makes a great deal of sense. One step more would be that all sound processing is within the speaker. IMHO, there is a bit of work to get there since wireless is still a bit immature for such an endeavor at this time (at least I believe so). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members agedhorse Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 Just like taking the human interface away from the guitar... it's called i-tunes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Comoxsam Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 I think that as long as some kind of signal distribution is needed, a place to plug in mic cables, it will remain more practical to have the mixer in a stage box of some kind. What if the mixer and the necessary plug-ins were integrated into a floor monitor or a center fill speaker in the middle of the stage. It would keep everything neat and tidy. Agreed that wireless is probably the future but in the meantime..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Shaster Posted December 14, 2014 Members Share Posted December 14, 2014 I still have to plug my singer's wireless mic into my mixer. Until there is a standardized format or platform that all wirless mics use, it seems there will still be physical, receiver to mixer cables involved. Maybe Line 6 is moving (or has moved) in this direction? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members agedhorse Posted December 15, 2014 Members Share Posted December 15, 2014 One of the greatest things about real pro audio is/was standardization of signal protocols. XLR always works this way... etc. Constant reinventing the wheel gets old and costly. Very old, and very costly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Kalina2 Posted December 15, 2014 Members Share Posted December 15, 2014 Movement in this direction is: http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/Xr12.aspx/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dbMontana Posted December 15, 2014 Members Share Posted December 15, 2014 What seems clear to me -- at least at my level -- is the the signal will not leave the stage area until it's in acoustical form (ie, from the speaker). All processing will happen there with user (remote?) control via network cable or (more likely as time goes on) wireless. Frankly I don't want a full blown 32-channel mixer built into (one of/all?) my powered speaker(s). Sure my DXR's have a simple/basic input for one line and one mic-level input but anything beyond that makes little sense to me. XLR cables into a stagebox/processor seems the best solution. (Related: My friend did a stint as ME for Nickle Creek and said they were fine with wireless IEMs but found wireless instrument/mic inputs of unacceptable quality/reliability). Remote tuning (wired or wireless) of individual speakers as in the Presonus AI models has a lot of merit given the right tools to set things -- think SMAART room analysis tweaking individual cabs? I still think that the UI of the control surface is where the most interesting innovation will be seen. I'm very comfortable mixing from iPad (and like the X32 app over the Presonus BTW) but would still prefer some sort of physical interface given the option. That said I think there's a lot of wasted surface and not enough display on my X32 Compact. I still fall back on a vision of a 15-17" laptop-like unit with a touch-screen display on the top half and a motorized fader bank (and maybe a few critical buttons -- think mute groups) on the lower half. I've done a few shows in large halls where I continuously wander the room listening and tweaking but much more often park myself on a barstool/chair in a good listening location for most of the evening and a laptop-like device would work fine for that. That all may well be a pipe dream however given the ubiquity of tablets (a free interface to the console manufacturers as Don has noted). Past all that it will also be the development of better UIs to processing tools as Moore's Law continues to make more and more possible (and cheap!). Anybody tried using the X32 "Compander" in comparison to the Waves multi-band compressor plugin available on a SC48? Nuff said there <wink>! Editted an omission for clarity... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted December 16, 2014 Members Share Posted December 16, 2014 I still have to plug my singer's wireless mic into my mixer. Until there is a standardized format or platform that all wirless mics use, it seems there will still be physical, receiver to mixer cables involved. Maybe Line 6 is moving (or has moved) in this direction? Can definitely see it for cheaper all-in-one systems for solos, duos and small bar bands. Speakers, built in mixer and 4 mics for one low price! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members DanCostello Posted December 16, 2014 Members Share Posted December 16, 2014 I don't get why the industry hasn't settled on a standard connector for lapel/headset mics and wireless transmitters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Unalaska Posted December 16, 2014 Members Share Posted December 16, 2014 As for the near future all inputs will remain analog, so intergrating a digital mixer into anything would be a huge mistake. If companies standardized protocol you'd start seeing 3rd party control surfaces which no manufacturer would want. MIDI still is the only protocol but there's too many different ways to control. Anyway, I'm just babbling on... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wesg Posted December 16, 2014 Members Share Posted December 16, 2014 I suspect that you will see 3rd party control surfaces for Behringer. Possibly in the next 12 months. Everything is out there today to do it. A mixer company who thinks they will assert market dominance by keeping their platform closed is probably wrong. As soon as there are two relatively open products, the aftermarket will start innovating like mad, selling mixers for whoever gets in on the game on the ground floor. Uli is already there. Who's going to join him? Maybe this is where Avid makes the leap to Live Sound? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dboomer Posted December 16, 2014 Members Share Posted December 16, 2014 I don't get why the industry hasn't settled on a standard connector for lapel/headset mics and wireless transmitters. That's easy ... price. If price were no object they would all use Lemo connectors. But at $50 each that would add $100 to anything. Use an 1/8" mini and you can do it for $1. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members dbMontana Posted December 16, 2014 Members Share Posted December 16, 2014 I suspect that you will see 3rd party control surfaces for Behringer. Possibly in the next 12 months. Everything is out there today to do it. A mixer company who thinks they will assert market dominance by keeping their platform closed is probably wrong. As soon as there are two relatively open products, the aftermarket will start innovating like mad, selling mixers for whoever gets in on the game on the ground floor. Uli is already there. Who's going to join him? Maybe this is where Avid makes the leap to Live Sound? Agreed. At least that's the way it's gone with my day job. I've spent the past twenty years first developing and then evolving a public-facing web interface to our "corporate" database of environmental data. For the past fifteen years it's been a nearly continuous process of refactoring our system into what has more recently become known as an N-tiered service-oriented architecture so that we could plug in various pieces as they became commoditized by commercial forces. Luckily we chose to pursue an open-source (LAMP stack) solution from the start making things much much easier. As much as the scientist in me would like to control the presentation of these data to provide the most relevant context for their interpretation, our biggest "customers" increasingly use automated access to the "bare" data itself to present it in ways most meaningful to their user communities. In these cases we just publish the API and maintain our services which are themselves commodities from their perspective. I'm a member of three different international committees focused on developing interoperable standards for the exchange of these data so that vendors, agencies, and researchers can access and exchange data (more) seamlessly worldwide. The community here is jam packed with engineers (which I am not) and commercial-product developers -- a label I in no way claim for myself -- but this is what I'm seeing nonetheless. Innovation will always have its place -- indeed will likely become even more important -- but it seems we're inevitably evolving toward an ever more open world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Unalaska Posted December 17, 2014 Members Share Posted December 17, 2014 3rd party works great when you're talking about cheap apps and accessories, but for mission critical and pieces where there's moving faders I don't see any growth there. Why wouldn't the original company just make the surface anyway? Oh yeah, they do. It's a whole new mixer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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