How Much Longer Will We Need This Analog Link?

When asked about the invention of the automobile, Henry Ford said “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.” Ford realized early on that a potential purchaser of his invention had no way to conceive of what an automobile was. They were thinking about how to make their current reality better.

Digital audio is quickly bringing live sound to the point where Ford stepped beyond his customer’s reality.

Up to now, the design theory behind bringing digital audio to live sound has been to make the sound person’s reality better. Give them more powerful tools while keeping them in charge of deciding how something should sound.

Now that digital mixing consoles have come way down in price and complication, they are being embraced at every level of the live sound industry. It’s common to see them in churches and schools. Digital microphones are next. When this new mic technology is embraced (sooner rather than later) by the live sound community, the digital signal chain will be almost complete.

I say almost, because there is one giant analog bump in what is otherwise soon to be a complete digital signal path. If you mix sound, that bump is YOU!

How far are we away from the digital live sound reality that doesn’t include the sound guy?

Here’s what I’m talking about.

Take the latest Dave Matthews Band album. It’s recorded digitally and everything on the album can be reproduced and analyzed in the digital domain. Stick with me here. I’m not talking about how a song is actually played, but rather the volume, tonal quality and relationship of all the sounds on the album to each other.

If the band wants to closely reproduce the sound of the record (the “mix” if you will) in a live performance, then why not have the person who used to mix the sound be replaced by a computer that knows what the song is supposed to sound like. Every instrument on stage will soon be introduced into the live sound system either by a digital direct box or a digital microphone. Instead of a human moving faders and twisting knobs, the computer doing the mix will maintain the tonal integrity, relative volumes and dozens of other parameters analyzed from the recorded sound. There will be no problem if the arrangement on stage changes from night to night, because the mixing computer doesn’t really care about how the song is played, only about how it sounds.

It wasn’t long ago that most of us believed that cost, reliability and user-complication would keep digital mixers from ever being accepted in the live sound world. We’re over that.

Look for this to happen with spoken word first.

A presenter will simply read a couple of sentences into a digital recorder that interfaces with a digital mixer. When the speaker steps up the podium, the sound system will already know what he or she is supposed to sound like. When this info is combined with the digital analysis of the output of the sound system (we’ve had this software in common use for years) then the true sound of the presenter’s voice can be delivered directly to every seat in the house.

Will the future of live digital sound need us at all? Let me know what you think.

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