You are right about the conceptual difference, which isn’t much of a difference on a 1D but on a 5D once you start putting mix masters and regular channels in the fader groups it can be a big issue suddenly. I can’t count the times I’ve watched engineers stumble over this one.

Also, the blink DCA assign lights with DCA mute should be on by default in the console. While it might not be an issue with analog consoles because the VCAs can’t be hiddne, with the 5D they can, and I’ve seen this trip up many experienced engineers when pulling up mix masters of fader groups and looking at those and seeing nothing muted (’cause the mute buttons are worthless and misleading in this mode!!) go on to stumble around for a minute or two trying to figure out what’s wrong.

Just a few more random gripes…

-Mikey P

As to the mutes on the VCAs versus on/off switches on channels thats a very obvious engineer in the EE sense versus engineer in the fader jockey sense. VCAs don’t turn ‘off’ in the manner of an audio channel and it seems like a not bad conceptual difference for the user to work with.

Dave

Mac

On the sales pitch thing, it’s hard to not do that, particularly when the content of the first session is basically the feature set. I like Andy and Jose on a personal level and thought they did well, considering it was one of the first they have done. It shows at times but doing that sort of thing isn’t easy and I’m sure after a while it will tighten up with respect to knowing the answers to the questions for the stuff with which they aren’t familiar. These kinds of things really are sales pitches to an extent as they aren’t charging us and feeding and swaging us as well. They hope we come with a good impression and tell others though I don’t know that they expected us to blog it. I specifically told Andy that I was blogging it, as well as blog about surfaces in general and they should be reading it and the LAB. I’m going to finish of the post in the second day though probably over the weekend. There is a semi regular meeting in a few hours of the “Drinking club with an audio problem” which is a social gathering that reads like a Who’s Who of Vegas sound folk.

You should blog your experience and come back here and plug a link to it. Hell, plug a link to it anyway I take your feed but I don’t know how many folks take any pro audio feeds.

Good point about the difference in the button states, hadn’t thought about that before. As for the user define on the M7, it’s pretty much a starter console and while I think that would be a great feature (especially when church volunteers run them) I think at that price point it’s starting to push the envelope but having some in software might be an easy fix.

Dave

I think it really comes down the the cultural paradigms at work. The attitude that they threw off to me seemed like a “well we built it and there’s nothing else like it, so use it and like it or else” especially in regards to user interface questions. There also seemed to be a pride issue when it comes to answering questions about the product. When they were explaining the Chan move feature of the V2, I asked (expecting an obvious answer) if it worked both ways, higher to lower and lower to higher. That puzzled the trainers for about 10 minutes while I mentioned to my classmates that we could probably have walked up to the V2 in front and have tried it by now. There was at least one or two other questions about hte V2 that were asked that could have been answered in under a minute by trying them on the console, but they always deffered to the manual.

One of my other pet peeves of the 1D and especially the 5D is why the channels have On buttons and the DCAs have Mute buttons? Isn’t that just asking for some confusion? I mean after 2 seconds at the desk one gets it and moves on, but I still find that kind of interface issue almost inexcusable. But not as inexcusable as the lack of user define keys on the M7.

-Mikey P

I almost stopped in today to try to get my powerbook to run 1D manager with an even older version of VirtualPC. Apparently the newer versions don’t like the Yamaha MIDI driver much. My mac had no problem whatsoever with the 5D they had there using the native mac software.

One thing you might have missed, was Will, an antendee from the first 1D session got wireless tablet PC control of the 5D and M7 working flawlessly, but was unable to make it happen with the 1D. He just used a tablet PC with a wireless access point to a USB server (ubox was the brand) and that to the console. After assigning the IP address of the USB server in the driver software on the tablet, away he went. It was even easier with the M7 as all he had to do was plug in the access point. He failed to get the 1D to work with it at any point, even with trying a serial server instead of the usb server. He said he’s never tried it on a gig yet, but plans to tomorrow and would let me know how it goes.

You in town for long? give me a call at 714.356.0168 if you’d like to meet for a drink or bite to eat.

-Mike