During the course of last year I predicted that we will not see much further development of digital mixing consoles, but rather a consolidation of product ranges and a concentration on smaller format consoles.
Well, Prolight+Sound, Frankfurt, ended this past weekend and there was a fair bit of movement on the digital mixing console front.
DiGiCo launched the SD5, positioned just under their flagship SD7, Cadac showed their new flagship digital console, the CDC-Eight, Midas had their Generation-II software for their consoles on show and Yamaha released their CL series consoles.
Mmmm, three new large format consoles, seems like I got this one wrong…
How far wrong was I? Cadac was certainly due for the CDC-8 as they didn’t really have a contender in the market and was/is getting hammered by DiGiCo in their traditional domain – musical theatre. So this can be seen as a consolidation and it must not be forgotten that they also launched the CDC-4, a small format console.
Yamaha, once dominant in the large format digital console market had also lost ground, a lot of ground, and people were starting to wonder if they were ever going to re-enter this market, or just concentrate on the smaller formats. The CL5 is the flagship of the range and has 72 mono and 8 stereo inputs, 24 mixes and 8 matrices, which doesn’t really put it in the same league as the other flagships. I would describe it as a medium format console.
DiGiCo nicely filled the gap between the SD10 and SD7 consoles with the SD5 which replaces the stalwart D5, again a consolidation of products.
Midas also went the consolidation route with the release of the Generation-II software with a host of new features for all their digital consoles.
So, in the end I did not get this altogether wrong and in these fast moving technological times, not too bad, I’d say.
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