Interesting Characteristics of Mixing Consoles

Try to see a recording studio or a DJ's console when you visit a dance club and, most probably, you will see a large gadget with knobs, metres, and fade bars. This gadget is called a mixing console, one of the most important equipment in many professional audio-visual applications.

A mixing console is an electronic device used to combine, route, or alter the dynamics of audio signals. Depending on the type of console, the device can mix analogue or digital signals. The signals are then summed up to produce a combined output signal. To better illustrate how a mixing console works, consider two singers performing a duet as an example. Each singer holds a microphone which is connected to a channel in the mixer. By adjusting the sound dynamics in each channel, the separate signals from each microphone are summed up and blended to be heard simultaneously through one set of speakers.

There have been debates on which type of mixer is better: analogue or digital. Even if they are old, analogue consoles are still being used because they have one knob, fader, or button per function, thus making the console very easy to operate. Even if they take a big amount of space, they allow a more instantaneous response time to constantly changing performance conditions.

On the other hand, digital mixers are more complex to operate due to the existence of virtual layers which alter the function of fader banks into separate controls for additional inputs. But this complexity allows it even greater flexibility than their analogue counterparts. In addition, technicians can create mixes from saved digital data, a costly and clumsy undertaking when using analogue mixers. Finally, digital technology allows technicians to mix sounds offline, making the need for a studio a moot point.

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