Reply To: the new automatic microphone mixing feature

[lesouvage]

Tonight I received a phonecall with a request to do the sound at a debating evening coming week. A good reason to test the AMM feature. I connected 5 mics and enabled the AMM feature on this channels. It seems to work all fine, when I used one of the mics I saw the level meters on the touch screen of the other channels going completely down. The devision of the total gain available between two channels wasn’t really visible but I assume that it will work OK. I tested it at my living room so I couldn’t pump up the volume to much.

But when none of the microphones is in use the touchscreen shows a gain volume on all the channels indicating that all the microphones will pick up ambience sound. Is this by purpose and what is the idea behind it? To me it feels more logical to have all the gains down when none of the microphones are in use.

A workaround to get all the gains of the microphones down is to add an extra channel with pink noise (or whatever constant sound) from my iPhone, enable the AMM feature on this extra channel and push the fader for L/R of this channel completely down. I gained this channel on a level that was just enough to get the AMM feature to work so the gains of all the mics were 0 as long as the mics were not used. This is working great. My question is if this workaround does make any sense or is it a solution for a non existing problem. Thanks in advance.