New Sound Board

[WebleyEdwards]

Good Morning All:
I have a question, I have been running an analog soundboard at our local Community Theatre for the past 10 years, and have just be appointed at our church to help upgrade our sound system, they are looking at spending around $20-25,000, my question is they want to go to a ditigial soundboard, and there is approx 5 people running the sound on a part time basis, I have been told the learning curve for ditigial is pretty intense, it's not like telling someone to go run sound on an anolog board, is this correct, are a bunch of parttimers getting in over there head?:

 

[avkid]

Are they willing to attend training sessions?
If they attend enough training it is possible for almost anyone to learn almost any subject.

 

[gafftaper]

Although I haven't had a chance to use it myself, my buddy has a Yamaha digital board in his theater. This theater is a busy road house with several regular renters including a church every Sunday. The beautiful thing about the digital board is that they can fine tune the settings for a particular group and then lock out access. So when the church comes in on Sunday and "Joe Sound Guy" steps up to the console, he can mix levels but he can't mess with any of the internal effects processing gear. When the symphony comes through, their preferred settings are saved to disk and instantly restored, and locked out so that "Jane Sound Girl" can safely be left alone with the system. Then Sunday morning they restore the church's settings from disk and they are off again.
So I think the answer is yes and no. Learning how to master the console does take some extra time. But you only need one or two people to have that level of training. The beauty is you can tune the place and then lock everything down so that your least trained "Joe Sound Guy" only has to worry about a couple of sliders and CAN'T screw up anything else.

Oh... and Welcome to the Booth!!

 

[Footer]

I just put up a show with a Yamaha M1000 console. My feeling on digital boards completely matter what you are doing with them. For on the fly things such as a road house, I would never want one. For a church where things rarely ever change, I think they would be great. If you do decide to go with a Yamaha console, I highly suggest specking a computer for it to run studio manager on it. This software makes the console much easier to operate. Digital consoles are great, the only real issue with them is figuring out how to get what you need out of the software. After you have got past how to dig through menus to find auxes, effects, and routing/patching it makes the entire process very painless.

 

[soundlight]

Actually, the PM5D works great in a road house setting, the Weis Center here has three of 'em. One stays in the booth for shows that don't require a row Z console, one gets used in row Z, and one gets used for monitors for the big acts.

 

[WebleyEdwards]

Thanks for the input, I just wanted to make sure we were not getting in over our head when it comes to training for it's use!

 

[Chris15]

Welcome to Controlbooth.

Now I know that this doesn't always stop me, but since I know little about digital mixers, I'll stay out of this one for the moment.