What is soundweb ?

[lewisurwin]

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[Eboy87]

I assume you're referring to the BSS Soundweb? I've not come into contact with the Soundweb London, only the original. It's a DSP, digital (in this case) system processor. The one I've been in contact with was being used to control a system in a theatre. Two Soundwebs controlled the Meyer FOH system: nearfield hangs, farfield hangs, subs, front fill, side fill, and stage side fills.

The cool thing about the Soundweb is that you can configure it however you want depending on the system and amount of control you want. It handles crossover, EQ, compression, limiting to protect the drivers, and I believe it even has a matrix built in.

I have a feeling Muse will be along momentarily to give a full run down of what all this does, but that's just the primer. What specific questions about the Soundweb do you have?

 

[rwhealey]

We have a BSS Soundweb London BLU-80 as our Digital Signal Processor (DSP).

Basically, we had a rack full of equalizers and crossovers. The BLU-80 replaced that entire rack. It converts the sound to digital, allows you to use all kinds of processing (for instance, limiting), then converts back to analog. (You can also input or output digital signals, depending on what input/output card you are using)

It's usually placed in the amp rack and is in the signal chain after the sound board but before the amplifiers.

If you're really interested, you can download the Soundweb Designer software for free and go through the tutorial, which I found pretty easy to follow.

 

[Hughesie]

When you learn a bit about it, soundweb designer can be a powerful tool. Mind you the whole external dsp thing is a bit of history as most high end digital consoles have dsp's inbult.

 

[museav]

Mind you the whole external dsp thing is a bit of history as most high end digital consoles have dsp's inbult.

I have to strongly disagree. At the same time that digital consoles are becoming more common, so are amplifiers with integrated DSP and dedicated speaker processors and I have yet to see any digital console, even high end ones, that provides the capabilities and flexibility of most dedicated DSP units. Try applying Nexo processing that uses amp output feedback or d&B's processing or EAW's Gunness Focusing using a console. Or try setting up separate box, array, room and subjective processing where you can adjust the factors that vary between venues without affecting those that do not.

Think about touring houses, can you really expect, and as the house want to rely on, every act using the house system providing appropriate system processing and setting it up properly? As the tour, is it practical to have to setup the system processing for every venue? Or in any application, do you really want to give anyone wanting any output processing full access to all of your system processing?

So regardless of the processing in the console, I believe that in most applications it is still a good idea to have separate system processing.

 

[Eboy87]

When you learn a bit about it, soundweb designer can be a powerful tool. Mind you the whole external dsp thing is a bit of history as most high end digital consoles have dsp's inbult.

As far as I know, EAW's UMX.96 is the only one that has the speaker processing built into the console. While the heart of every digital console is a DSP chip (or several), you still need an external unit to handle things like driver protection and crossover functions.

Now, if you'd have said something like, "Standalone DSP units are being phased out because many new amplifiers have built-in DSP functions," I'd be slightly inclined to agree. The I-Tech, XTi, Lab.Gruppen, and I believe Camco all offer amps with the built-in DSP. There is an article in Live Sound International about Nine Inch Nails' current tour. They're using the new LA-RAK from L'Acoustics to power their arrays (which are a topic unto themselves). The racks are filled with essentially L'Acoustics branded Camco amps, with all the processing built in, yet they're still using a Dolby Lake as their system controller.

So I don't see stand-alone DSP's being phased out any time soon.

[/hijack]