The 5D Files

We spent a good bit of time in the last two weeks rearranging things in the control room to take advantage of the new Yamaha PM5d digital mixer.
One of the cool things about this mixer was that we really didn't need to change a whole lot to get it up and running. It plugged right up to the old mixer's harness. I think I needed to cut about four wire-ties to make things reach.
Of course, there are some differences that required some re-wiring and patch bay changes (lots of re-labeling). For instance, the new mixer doesn't have insert jacks. We only had twelve inserts wired to the patch bay for use on the PM4000 so we had a total of 24 patch points there to reclaim. I think those all went to the MY8ADDA card that we had installed in the new mixer. That's a card that gives you eight more input points and eight output ports to the mixer, all analog. It doesn't give you any more mixes or channels but you need it if you want to do any inserts or direct outs on the 5d. One advantage of digital mixers is the ability to multi-patch outputs. If you want to send mix 5 to more than one place, you can simply tell the mixer to patch it to the MY card slot in addition to the normal mix output.
I picked-out three MY cards for the 5D. In addition to the MY8ADDA, we got a CobraNet card and the MY 16AE AES I/O card.
The CobraNet card is very handy if you have a computer network around. We are fortunate enough to have a gigabit backbone in our facility and some IT guys who are not adverse to sharing some of their bandwidth with the audio guy. I got them to carve us out a VLan and I have a couple Whirlwind boxes that allow me to get the audio in and out of the Cobranet. We created a little network of our own around the control room and by connecting the feed that the IT guys gave me, I can ship up to 16 channels to and from just about anywhere on the Dome/convention center/park campus. That's a powerful tool, if you ask me. This stuff is all pretty new to us at the moment though so we're reserving judgement until we have used it for a while. I'll be pretty disappointed if we don't find that the CobraNet stuff performs reliably. Given my desire to have total reliability, anything that gives us problems usually ends up on a shelf before long.
The MY16AE has been somewhat of a disappointment so far. The disappointment isn't really the cards fault though as it stems from my limited understanding of the whole sample rate/sync/AES/Word clock world. I have a few digital audio devices in the control room that I figured I'd be able to plug into the AES card. What I failed to realize was that these CD/DAT/MD players and the Instant Replay all pretty much want to run on their own internal clock. If you make the Instant Repay the master, the mixer is fine with that but the CD players won't sync-up. If you change the clock to the CD player, the Instant Replay is grumpy. Even if I hook-up the one CD player that accepts it to the mixer's word clock output, I have to change from 48K to 44.1 to get it to sync-up and then the CobraNet card isn't happy. It's all kind-of a pain. We ended-up putting the two CD players and the Instant Replay on the 2 track Digital inputs of the mixer because they have sample rate conversion. At this point, I'm not sure what I'll be able to use the MY16AE card for. I'm hoping I'll be able to use it when we're re-fitting the video control room next year.
That's it for now. The first game is next weekend so maybe I'll have some notes from that. It took us quite a while to get the mixer set-up in a mix for the NFL games. The differences in the new mixer prompted a number of changes and there were many decisions to make.

CW