Stereo Missile
03-29-2014, 05:24 AM
Ok so I got to play with the S6 for about 3 hours yesterday. Avid Australia were kind enough to fly me down to Melbourne for a private demo in a nice studio, very impressed buy that level of customer service I must say! Just a bit of background, although this console seems to be strongly aimed at the Post Production market, I'm strictly a music guy, so my perspective might be a bit different.
Overall impression of the console: Loved it! Sure there are still some kinks to iron out in the software, it's not all there yet, but what is already there is great and more than enough to do serious work. Some of the things they have planned are just so cool if they can be implemented well.
A few things:
- it's quite a bit smaller than I thought it would be, which is actually good for the ergonomics, the only thing is I am a little long sighted and I found I had to wear my glasses to see what some of the buttons and displays were saying because they were quite small. Having said that they look really nice, the little OLED screens are very slick.
- The faders and knobs are very nice, really smooth to use and easy to work in small increments such as 0.1 db. That sort of thing is really important to me after using controllers that move in clunky increments like 0.5 db or worse.
- I love how easy it is to insert EQ and dynamics from the channel strip and start tweaking straight away. No menus or flicking around trying to read cryptic 6 letter abbreviations for parameters, you just insert it and it's there, don't even need to stop playback. Nice!
- automation enable of plugin parameters from the surface is instant, just hold down the 3 modifiers at the bottom of the fader unit (Cmd+Cntrl+Optn) and tap the parameter knob then it's auto enabled. Switching automation modes on the channels was quick and easy, though it would have been nice to have dedicated mode buttons for read/write/touch/latch/off, rather than having to cycle through them. You can switch directly to each mode using the master section though.
- using the knob modules on each channel was great, it's so fast to switch between EQ, dynamics, sends with the knob module and quickly find what you are looking for. I had wondered whether I would end up bringing everything I wanted to work on onto the focus fader so i could use the touch screen and 8 knobs, but in practice I found myself EQing and tweaking stuff on the channel strips quite a lot because it was easy. Start tweaking a plugin on the channel and the plugin pops up on your Protools monitor so you are getting visual feedback like EQ curve, gain reduction etc. The plan is to be able to spill out a single plugins parameters over the whole knob section, so for example you could spill an EQ out over the knob module and have a full parametric EQ layout with 7 bands of Gain, Frequency, Q etc all laid out properly. Very cool!
- the centre touch screen i did not find myself using it as much as I might have. If I had colour coded my session before hand it would have made it much easier to navigate. What I did use the centre section for though was to pull up a reverb and a VI so that I could bring up the parameters on the 8 knobs. It was actually a lot better than I thought it would be, the parameters came up with proper readable names and it was really easy to quickly tweak the reverb, the envelopes and filters on the synth. I had wondered how well that would work in practice, as with more complex plugins I have found in the past it's usually easier to just use the mouse and find things in the GUI. At the moment you can only bring up the parameters on the knobs in banks of 4 together, but it seems the future is to be able to put any parameter on any knob at will and save these layouts as you wish.
- Master section and automation module was cool, I think I would need a lot more time on the desk though to get my head around it. There are a ton of functions on all of the buttons and I think after spending some significant time on the desk I would work out what was where so that it would be quick and easy. The various banks of buttons also have several pages each that you can scroll through. The real power of this section will come when you are able to create custom banks of buttons that you can call up depending on the particular workflow you need. For example you could bring up one customised bank for editing or arranging, another for tracking, another for mix down and automation, window layouts, memory locations, you name it.
- Transport and Jog wheel were good, nothing too much to report there except that it was what you would expect from a console of this quality.
- And now we come to the big one, the monitor screens. Actually in real life they are quite small, not that that is a bad thing. I have been tossing up whether I can justify the extra expense of the screens. After all do I really need scrolling waveforms? Well actually in use I really liked them, and the most obvious strength was something that wasn't immediately apparent to me until I used it - the screens make it so much easier to find the channel on the desk that you are looking for. Instead of having to search around the track names at the bottom of the channel strips, you can just see from the waveforms on the screen which channel you want. I found that to be quite a time saver and found myself working faster and easier without having to search for channels as much.
There is a lot more planned for the monitor screens as well. Mini EQ curve is nice when you are tweaking eq on the channel strip. But it seems that we might in future be able to bring up some sort of GUI over the whole screen on the monitors, for example if you spilled a plugin over the whole know section and brought up the GUI on the monitor at the same time, that would be brilliant. There were some issues with the waveform scrolling on the system that I used, but those are little kinks that will be ironed out with software updates.
The only major issue that I have with the monitor screens is simply the price. The fact that they are only compatible with the M40 means that for a 16 channel system the difference in price between the M10-16-5 and the M40-16-5 with monitors is about $30k. That's the cost of a new car, pretty much, for 2 screens! I know Avid will say "but the M40 is expandable to 128 channels etc", but what about us guys who only want 16 channels and want to build our room around a console that size? The expandability is no use to me at all. It's very difficult to justify spending an extra $30k simply for the 2 monitor screens. Having said that, they DO provide great bonuses for workflow with the desk, and they also look great and are undoubtedly more impressive for clients if you are looking for the wow factor.
It's still very early days for the S6 and there are still some kinks and bugs to work out, they are aware of these and are working on them to get it sorted. Some of the ones that I noticed were:
- waveform scrolling was still continuing after playback had stopped and seemed to lose sync with the session at times
- when you bring up pan on the channel strip knob section to access stereo panning, if you have pan L for example set on the single knob above the fader (which is the default setting), then only the pan R knob on the channel strip works
- on the EQ section on the knob module we were not able to adjust the filter slope for the HPF and LPF using the knobs on the Avid EQ3 plugin, although Q for EQ bands was working fine.
- there is still a whole lot of things that are planned that have not yet been implemented
I will be ordering one of these desks on Monday, it's far and away the best workflow I have seen with a DAW, the level of integration with protools is already great and it's only going to get better. The thing I have to decide now is whether to go the huge extra expense for the monitors. Need to sleep on it some more.
I'd like to give a big shoutout to David Sullivan and Avid Australia for flying me down to Melbourne to try the desk, setting up studio time and going through the desk with me, thanks that was really great guys.
Any questions you guys have I'd be happy to answer if I can. :)
Overall impression of the console: Loved it! Sure there are still some kinks to iron out in the software, it's not all there yet, but what is already there is great and more than enough to do serious work. Some of the things they have planned are just so cool if they can be implemented well.
A few things:
- it's quite a bit smaller than I thought it would be, which is actually good for the ergonomics, the only thing is I am a little long sighted and I found I had to wear my glasses to see what some of the buttons and displays were saying because they were quite small. Having said that they look really nice, the little OLED screens are very slick.
- The faders and knobs are very nice, really smooth to use and easy to work in small increments such as 0.1 db. That sort of thing is really important to me after using controllers that move in clunky increments like 0.5 db or worse.
- I love how easy it is to insert EQ and dynamics from the channel strip and start tweaking straight away. No menus or flicking around trying to read cryptic 6 letter abbreviations for parameters, you just insert it and it's there, don't even need to stop playback. Nice!
- automation enable of plugin parameters from the surface is instant, just hold down the 3 modifiers at the bottom of the fader unit (Cmd+Cntrl+Optn) and tap the parameter knob then it's auto enabled. Switching automation modes on the channels was quick and easy, though it would have been nice to have dedicated mode buttons for read/write/touch/latch/off, rather than having to cycle through them. You can switch directly to each mode using the master section though.
- using the knob modules on each channel was great, it's so fast to switch between EQ, dynamics, sends with the knob module and quickly find what you are looking for. I had wondered whether I would end up bringing everything I wanted to work on onto the focus fader so i could use the touch screen and 8 knobs, but in practice I found myself EQing and tweaking stuff on the channel strips quite a lot because it was easy. Start tweaking a plugin on the channel and the plugin pops up on your Protools monitor so you are getting visual feedback like EQ curve, gain reduction etc. The plan is to be able to spill out a single plugins parameters over the whole knob section, so for example you could spill an EQ out over the knob module and have a full parametric EQ layout with 7 bands of Gain, Frequency, Q etc all laid out properly. Very cool!
- the centre touch screen i did not find myself using it as much as I might have. If I had colour coded my session before hand it would have made it much easier to navigate. What I did use the centre section for though was to pull up a reverb and a VI so that I could bring up the parameters on the 8 knobs. It was actually a lot better than I thought it would be, the parameters came up with proper readable names and it was really easy to quickly tweak the reverb, the envelopes and filters on the synth. I had wondered how well that would work in practice, as with more complex plugins I have found in the past it's usually easier to just use the mouse and find things in the GUI. At the moment you can only bring up the parameters on the knobs in banks of 4 together, but it seems the future is to be able to put any parameter on any knob at will and save these layouts as you wish.
- Master section and automation module was cool, I think I would need a lot more time on the desk though to get my head around it. There are a ton of functions on all of the buttons and I think after spending some significant time on the desk I would work out what was where so that it would be quick and easy. The various banks of buttons also have several pages each that you can scroll through. The real power of this section will come when you are able to create custom banks of buttons that you can call up depending on the particular workflow you need. For example you could bring up one customised bank for editing or arranging, another for tracking, another for mix down and automation, window layouts, memory locations, you name it.
- Transport and Jog wheel were good, nothing too much to report there except that it was what you would expect from a console of this quality.
- And now we come to the big one, the monitor screens. Actually in real life they are quite small, not that that is a bad thing. I have been tossing up whether I can justify the extra expense of the screens. After all do I really need scrolling waveforms? Well actually in use I really liked them, and the most obvious strength was something that wasn't immediately apparent to me until I used it - the screens make it so much easier to find the channel on the desk that you are looking for. Instead of having to search around the track names at the bottom of the channel strips, you can just see from the waveforms on the screen which channel you want. I found that to be quite a time saver and found myself working faster and easier without having to search for channels as much.
There is a lot more planned for the monitor screens as well. Mini EQ curve is nice when you are tweaking eq on the channel strip. But it seems that we might in future be able to bring up some sort of GUI over the whole screen on the monitors, for example if you spilled a plugin over the whole know section and brought up the GUI on the monitor at the same time, that would be brilliant. There were some issues with the waveform scrolling on the system that I used, but those are little kinks that will be ironed out with software updates.
The only major issue that I have with the monitor screens is simply the price. The fact that they are only compatible with the M40 means that for a 16 channel system the difference in price between the M10-16-5 and the M40-16-5 with monitors is about $30k. That's the cost of a new car, pretty much, for 2 screens! I know Avid will say "but the M40 is expandable to 128 channels etc", but what about us guys who only want 16 channels and want to build our room around a console that size? The expandability is no use to me at all. It's very difficult to justify spending an extra $30k simply for the 2 monitor screens. Having said that, they DO provide great bonuses for workflow with the desk, and they also look great and are undoubtedly more impressive for clients if you are looking for the wow factor.
It's still very early days for the S6 and there are still some kinks and bugs to work out, they are aware of these and are working on them to get it sorted. Some of the ones that I noticed were:
- waveform scrolling was still continuing after playback had stopped and seemed to lose sync with the session at times
- when you bring up pan on the channel strip knob section to access stereo panning, if you have pan L for example set on the single knob above the fader (which is the default setting), then only the pan R knob on the channel strip works
- on the EQ section on the knob module we were not able to adjust the filter slope for the HPF and LPF using the knobs on the Avid EQ3 plugin, although Q for EQ bands was working fine.
- there is still a whole lot of things that are planned that have not yet been implemented
I will be ordering one of these desks on Monday, it's far and away the best workflow I have seen with a DAW, the level of integration with protools is already great and it's only going to get better. The thing I have to decide now is whether to go the huge extra expense for the monitors. Need to sleep on it some more.
I'd like to give a big shoutout to David Sullivan and Avid Australia for flying me down to Melbourne to try the desk, setting up studio time and going through the desk with me, thanks that was really great guys.
Any questions you guys have I'd be happy to answer if I can. :)