DSP is preferable for
system tuning/balancing.
Console's get wiped. Firmware gets reloaded, files get factory defaulted. Someone may have spent 3 days tuning the
system properly with
Smaart or SIM time aligning the cabinets, verifying
polarity, setting limiters and EQ and gains, and one person can quickly undo all that work permanently by screwing around in a
console.
Artistically, it's also more intuitive to
send the mixes you want to a
DSP and let the
DSP parse them out. That's includes to back of
house, front of
house, delays, side fills, hearing assist,
etc. If you try and set up discrete mixes for all of those different destinations in a
console you'll burn up your mix and matrix busses in no time.
Other functions like hearing assist or a
house mic feed backstage and into the
lobby need to be operational even if the
console is turned off. A
DSP can facilitate this.
Logistically, I prefer all of the tuning/balancing in a
DSP. You will get much of the same functionality in amplifier-provided settings but it doesn't scale well if you have lots of speakers. You burn up a lot of time making minor adjustments. Depending on the product
line, for some configurations you end up doing some EQ/balancing in the
DSP and then some in the
amplifier. Puts you in a position where if you're not careful it's easy to fight yourself and murder your
gain structure.
Other things I like to use
DSP's for. I'll stick a touch panel in the booth and on-stage with 2 mix modes. One is for "Quick Mix", which is the
house mic to backstage and lobbies, and a few handheld and
lapel wireless mic's and some aux inputs on either side of the
stage. All of the EQ and gains are
preset in the
DSP. Someone wants to run a quick talking-head event with just a couple mic's or run a rehearsal with playback -- you can give them a few faders and
mute buttons on a touch panel and they don't have to go anywhere near the mix
console or learn how to run a full sound
system. The touch panel also offers Mix
Console Mode, which kills the Quick Mix inputs and gives you much more control of the
system from the mix
console, while also offering you various options for things like booth monitors. Do you want to your booth monitors to be
cue monitors that work off your solo buss, or do you want them to be just off of the
house mic for a show that's largely acoustic? You have an option for that.
The
DSP also does things like provides the
house mic feed to the hearing assist and
FOH/BOH feeds, while allowing you to inject vocal mixes that
duck the
house mic and ride on top. This gives you strong speech intelligibility where you need it, while still letting you hear the music. But in the areas this mix serves they really need speech intelligibility above all else.
A properly tuned
system through a
DSP will give you much more bang for the buck than trying to replicate this through your
console or through your amps. If you spend $150,000 on your sound
system, you should get $150,000 worth of value out of it. If you only spend $145,000 and skip the
DSP, you're liable to get a sound
system that sounds like you spent $5,000 on it.
In short, it lets you focus on the art of that specific event by offering you a solid baseline to drive you
system from. Try juggling all of that in your
console and every soundcheck becomes simply trying to get proof of life out of all of your different mixes and you end up not having time to make the show actually sound good.
Re: Processing amps. I run into these a lot and end up ignoring their onboard processing if I have a
DSP in the
system. Even in a $700,000 d&b rig I'll use the amps only for the
Array Processing feature and keep all of the EQ, delay, and so forth in the
DSP. Makes programming easier, and reduces the number of moving parts. I brought a
system online not long ago where they had 24 Y-series boxes, 2 Renkus sticks for side fills and ceiling speakers for delays. They had 7 different
array configurations with and without front fills, with the
line arrays flown out high for theater, or hanging way down low for rock n
roll, with L/R subs when they need a
thrust and with a 6-sub
array for everything else. Tuning had to happen at the same time the control
system to flip between all these presets was going on. We encountered issues with the
Crestron programmer reloading code and recalling presets that wiped our settings. Our philosophy quickly went away from using presets in amplifiers or even in the
DSP to using routers in the
DSP to flip signal chains accordingly. Made it much easier to guarantee tuning efforts would not be compromised inadvertently by an accidental
preset recall before the latest changes were saved.
Laundry list of reasons to keep
system settings out of amplifiers, but especially out of consoles.