Spirit Digital 328, Руководство пользователя

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SECTION
2: The Benefits Of Digital Mixing
8
328 FOCUS: DIGITAL INTERFACES
The Spirit Digital 328 has both stereo and multi-
channel digital interfaces, enabling you to connect
a wide range of digital equipment to its inputs and
outputs. There are two sets of 8-channel ins and
outs, using on-board ADAT optical and TDIF
(Tascam) format interfaces, for group/tape out-
puts and tape returns. Both AES/EBU and SPDIF
interfaces are also supported, allowing FX sends
and returns, the stereo mix output, and 2-track
returns (for DAT machines or other stereo mas-
tering media) to be carried by digital as well as
analogue connections.
328 FOCUS: USE WITH PCI CARDS
More and more studios, especially small personal
facilities, exploit the power of PCI cards installed
in personal computers to provide cost-effective yet
high quality and sophisticated recording and pro-
duction. A fairly standard PC or Mac, equipped
with a suitable £500 card, could offer multi-track
random access digital recording and playback,
replacing a studio multitrack tape recorder. With
the right card and software, you could add sample
playback and sophisticated effects, putting many
of a studio’s electronic instruments inside the
computer. This technology has become very cheap
because of the falling price and easy availability of
chips and other components. Also, the adoption of
multi-channel digital interfaces like the ADAT opti-
cal system means that the ability to handle multi-
ple channels of audio input and output can be
easily included on these cards, but a good mixer
front end is essential to exploit this kind of tech-
nology to the full. The Digital 328 interfaces easily
and effectively with these cards and the systems
that they are intended to support. A typical setup
might involve a Mac or PC with a Korg 1212 card,
running Steinberg’s Cubase Audio VST software.
Using the ADAT optical connections, the 328’s
eight group outputs feed the Korg 1212’s eight
ADAT inputs, and the ‘tape’ returns go from com-
puter to the 328 also via an ADAT optical inter-
face. (If the computer is fast enough to allow
more than eight tracks of playback, the internal
pre-mixing abilities of Cubase Audio can be used
to pre-mix several tracks to each of the eight avail-
able output busses).
328 FOCUS - SNAPSHOTS VERSUS
DYNAMIC AUTOMATION
Depending on the nature of a project, either the
328’s snapshot or dynamic automation, or a mix-
ture of both, may be most appropriate. For exam-
ple, you might use snapshots to store basic mixer
setups for several different songs that you are
working in, or for sessions for different artists,
and then use dynamic automation for mixdown. If
you’re working to picture, snapshots can be par-
ticularly useful. By recalling snapshots against
timecode, changes in the mix can be easily made
to happen in precise sync with picture edits, and if
the picture is re-cut, you simply need to change
the timecode values for the audio cues rather
than rebuild a whole dynamic mix.
328 FOCUS: E-STRIP
The key to the Spirit Digital 328’s user interface is
the E-strip, a row of 16 rotary encoders above the
16 motorised channel faders. Its primary function
is to operate exactly like a regular analogue mixer
channel, only rotated through 90 degrees, with the
familiar 3-band EQ controls, four aux sends, two
effects sends (to the two internal processors), and
pan control. As well as being familiar, it’s easy to
use: just hit the select button for the channel you
want, and the E-strip’s continuous rotary con-
trollers put all the channel EQ, aux and pan facili-
ties at your fingertips. A ring of LEDs around each
controller shows you the current setting for each
parameter. Channel features that are used less
often, such as bus routing and phase reverse, are
controlled via the master section, while the chan-
nel’s analogue controls (100Hz high-pass filter
and channel input gain) are found at the top of
the front panel. The second function of the E-strip
is to give simultaneous control of a set of 16 Level,
Pan, or send controls for FX1 or 2, or Aux 1 to 4,
for channels 1-16 or 17-32.
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