#Sound control knobs update#
#Sound control knobs Pc#
#Sound control knobs professional#

I even had to resort to reading the manual, and I'm glad I did because it revealed a chunky and deterministic approach to interface design that's hard to fault. So much so, that it's a bit of a handful if you've not used a 'traditional' camera for a while. It's a fascinating camera, mainly because the top of the device is festooned with good old-fashioned knobs. I bought an X-T3 recently when I needed to capture some high-quality video for an online interview. These are purposely retro-looking, to good effect. Perhaps the only drawback is that touchscreens aren't particularly easy to use in bright sunlight.Īt the other end of the scale are - for example - the Fujifilm XT-(X) cameras.

#Sound control knobs update#

This approach has a huge advantage: you can update the camera easily. But Blackmagic has turned its touchscreen menus into fine art. Blackmagic is an excellent example of this approach, although as their cinema cameras have evolved, they do have dedicated physical controls, where it's a matter of pure ergonomics or simply convenience. It's perfectly possible to build a camera with almost no knobs, thanks to touchscreens. It doesn't have to be like that - but it's more convenient to keep everything together. For compactness, they've never gone through the same evolution as digital mixing consoles, in that the camera contains all the processing. Modern cameras are all digital behind their sensors. That's almost certainly how the remote control for your HiFi amplifier works. It's vital to get audio levels right before they're digitised (because of the fixed 'dynamic range window' of digital audio converters.) But there's nothing to stop you from controlling even analogue devices digitally. Where you do need physical controls is back in the analogue domain.

Why drag all the audio cables to a physical mixing desk at the back of the auditorium when you can take them to a convenient place at the side of the stage - and then connect the mixing control surface via a slim network cable? It's a topology that just makes sense.

It's become a typical architecture for live production too.

#Sound control knobs Pc#

Except, of course, that the external box is now typically a PC or a Mac. This is the typical architecture in a modern studio. Each movable part of this 'surface' is a digital controller that sends messages and commands to a separate box carrying out the audio processing. Instead, what we still think of as the mixing console is actually a 'control surface'. They don't do anything to the sound because no audio flows through a modern mixing desk. To put it another way, the thing that we refer to when we say 'mixer' actually did the mixing. In an analogue mixing desk, the audio flows through the channels - through the gain, EQ, Pan and fader controls. Give or take a few computer screens, and modern studios don't look all that different.īut under the surface, everything's changed. Crammed with 'outboard' equipment, at the centre would be a gigantic mixing desk. Picture a recording studio from the 1970s. They were so effective at scientific and engineering calculations that they were used for over three hundred years until digital calculators came along.

Slide rules (you must be in your late 50s to remember them) were wooden sticks with numbers written on them. Even machines used for calculations were analogue.

#Sound control knobs professional#

Radios, record players, tape recorders, televisions, computers - well, not computers - and just about every consumer or professional device you could think of up to and including most of the 1970s. David Shapton on the persistence of physical controls for a digital world and the continued importance of a good old-fashioned knob.Ĭast your minds back to the day when everything was analogue.