When The Beatles first experimented with four track tape recorders back in the Sixties, no one would perhaps have imagined that one day those four tracks might grow to forty eight, and that the few meagre knobs and buttons on the 'mixer' might grow into many hundreds stretching as far as the eye could see.

Then one can imagine that the idea of mixer automation would have been looked on with vague amusement, and indeed it would have been almost totally unnecessary.

It would have been a relatively simple job to reset all the controls on the mixer to their original settings in a matter of seconds, and one may be fairly certain that the engineer would have been capable of having his hands on as many faders as required to perform the mix single-handed.

Here in the Eighties, many studio consoles are automated but I think it would be fair to say that a large number of people rarely use the automation system, finding it often faster to perform the mix manually using highly skilled human reactions and control.

This can either be due to a badly designed automation system which ends up being more trouble to operate than it is to forget it, or to a lack of familiarity on behalf of the engineer stemming perhaps from a desire to retain the manual skills.

Over the past five years especially, we have seen console automation systems developing steadily and rapidly as microprocessor control begins to take over the inner workings of a number of mixing systems, leading to the present day when ultimately it is possible to automate dynamically every control on the mixing console.

STATE OF THE ART

Elsewhere in this issue you may read about so-called 'snapshot' automation, this being the means by which control settings on the console surface may be frozen in a memory to be recalled at a later date. In this short section I will concentrate primarily on state-of-the-art fader automation systems, this being the direct means by which the mixing engineer may be aided in the almost superhuman task of managing an enormous number of faders, all of which may need attention regularly.

SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

Fader automation has taken two diverse roads, that of the moving fader and that of the so-called VCA fader.

Up until quite recently, moving faders were almost entirely confined to the realms of early Neve NECAM systems, of which a small number exist, whereas the vast majority of automation systems used a fader which indirectly controlled the gain of an amplifier in the signal path, with the major disadvantage that the fader position did not always indicate the absolute gain of the channel. Such VCA fader systems were pioneered by MCI in the early-to-mid Seventies, and now find themselves incorporated (in refined forms) into all of Solid State Logic's consoles, Audio Kinetics' Mastermix automation and Harrison's Autoset, to name but three. Mitsubishi's 'Intelligent Digital Fader' automation is an interesting modern variation on this theme.

It is partly due to the poor performance of early moving fader systems that they didn't gain greater popularity to begin with; I think that if you had been asked 10 years ago whether moving faders or non-moving faders would predominate in the long run, the chances are that you would have gone for the moving faders, mainly because of the sheer beauty of the idea.

Nevertheless, as we can see, the world is covered with SSL consoles. Interestingly, the tables are turning: almost all of the latest console designs to be launched incorporate proposals for, or implementations of, some form of moving fader automation, which is perhaps a sign that the technology has come of age. If one makes a quick resume of a few important new designs, one can see that Harrison's Series 10, Trident's DI-AN, Amek's AFC, Audix's Assignable Mixing System, and the Neve V-Series consoles all fall into this category.

There are a number of reasons why it may be more attractive to install a VCA fader system, the predominant one being cost.

It is clearly going to be quite a lot more expensive to build touch-sensitive, motor-driven faders than it is to incorporate a VCA chip into each channel. It is also possible that the VCA system may be able to respond faster to changes in the fader position than a moving fader would: Neve specify about 0.3 seconds from top to bottom with NECAM 96, and I believe that the GML system is faster. Even so, it is probably rare for extreme speed to be very important, as most changes are made gradually, the mute being used for fast cuts.

KEEPING THE MIX

Back in the early days of such systems, it was necessary to take up at least two tracks of one's multi track tape for the recording of 'automation data', this being a stream of digital information spewing forth from the console containing information about all the fader movements and mutes. This data was at a low enough rate to be recorded as an audio signal, and could be recorded-in real-time, alongside the multi track music. In order to update the mix data recorded on one track, you would play it back into the console, change whatever you liked whenever you liked, and re-record the modified data on the other data track of the tape. In this way the mix data would be bounced back and forth between the two tracks until it was satisfactory.

Tape-based data storage caused a number of problems:

• A slight delay was incurred on each update pass, which could accumulate after many updates so that mutes became slightly late.

• Two tracks would be lost on the tape, as well as the problems with crosstalk between automation data and audio.

• Only the current mix and the previous mix would ever be available because of the need to overwrite data tracks on an update.

Modern disk storage automation means that the user can decide at any point to keep a mix, without having to worry that he'll lose it if he does another update. This method of storage should also eliminate the other two problems above. Floppy disks are the predominant storage medium and can be removed to another site for replication of the mix as long as the same system is used. There is an exception to this rule, and it lies with the George Massenburg Labs moving fader systems, only now being introduced into this country along with the Amek APC 1000 console, whereby the system, I am told, can read automation data from disks produced by both NECAM and SSL systems. Unfortunately this wheeze doesn't work in reverse, so you can't take GML disks and read them in your SSL or Neve console!

A number of manufacturers are incorporating 'hard' disks into their systems, these being fixed, non-removable storage media with a very high data capacity, so that many mixes can be stored and held concurrently, with very fast access to any part of the disk if required. At the end of the session it would then be feasible to copy only the few mixes which were good to a floppy disk which could be taken away. Hard disk automation would be quite expensive due to the hardware involved, although the cost of fixed magnetic storage media is beginning to come down, and to appear in more audio products (AMS Audiofile, for example).

KEEPING THE FADER SYSTEM SEPARATE

It is interesting to notice the direction being taken by a number of companies, which aim to separate the fader automation system from any other automated parts of the console. For example, if the console is of the assignable type, it is quite possible that a large amount of data may be produced pertaining to the static or dynamic positions of other controls like EQ, panning, etc., which is often kept on a separate disk to that which holds the fader data. One reason for this is that it leaves the customer with a choice over the type of fader automation which will sub his needs and his pocket, as there are so many possibilities with a wide variation in price between them.

One can see that this might leave the door wide open for a number of competing manufacturers to produce 'retrofit' automation, as opposed to the traditional practice which usually ties the customer to a specific automation system.

TOTAL CONTROL

It is clear that the console is becoming the control centre of the studio, and thus increasingly it is incorporating forms of tape machine control and synchronisation within the automation system. As the worlds of audio and video production move closer and closer together it will be almost imperative that the sound studio equips itself to handle video edit decision lists, video synchronisation and associated paraphernalia, otherwise there will be no smooth transition between the two sides of the production.

CMX has produced the CASS 1 (Computer Aided Sound System) which combines fader automation, multiple tape machine control and automatic EDL entry from CMX video editors. It combines useful graphic displays and other means to provide audio editing, synchronisation and dubbing to a picture all in one retrofit unit, of which the fader automation is only a part.

Calrec's recent merger with AMS should also produce some interesting results along the lines of the completely automated audio editing and mixing system, and we also see that these are the lines along which SSL's thinking is running, judging from its recent publication about the future of audio console design.

Lucasfilm has achieved this end, albeit in a very expensive and comprehensive digital form with its Sound and EditDroids, although presently these systems seem best suited to very large film and video production operations. Perhaps we will see offshoots of this type of technology providing systems for the common man with less than £100,000 to spend in the future.