[CameronProAudioParticipant]

Indeed there is, as shown in the markup picture I made. But it doesn’t tell you the contribution of the DCA which would be very nice to have.

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

Here’s the Avid Venue UI with VCA/DCA indicators, image attached.

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[CameronProAudioParticipant]

I made a video yesterday of how fast I can set up a show on an old Avid Venue. A&H product manager folks, if you have not ever worked on a Venue and used this feature, I highly suggest you rent one for a few days and see what a difference it makes and workflow to have this capability. https://youtu.be/orX6jssSk3Y?si=DK_0iGIKC_SHr2Vs

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

I made a video yesterday of how fast I can set up a show on an old Avid Venue. A&H product manager folks, if you have not ever worked on a Venue and used this feature, I highly suggest you rent one for a few days and see what a difference it makes and workflow to have this capability. https://youtu.be/orX6jssSk3Y?si=DK_0iGIKC_SHr2Vs

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

My thread on the issue:

Input Libraries should also store/recall bus assignments

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

I made this same basic request as well. I’ve been using Avid desks for over a decade and when recalling a channel, all aspects are recalled including routing to various busses (monitor auxes, fx sends, groups, DCAs, etc) along with the name. It’s very frustrating that such a logical feature is missing from these desks. I can setup a show from scratch with an Avid desk and my channel presets in a couple of minutes before soundcheck once I have the input list. With Avantis, I takes 10x longer…

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

Indeed you can. But there should be an option to copy & paste the channel in it’s entirety. Instead, there are multiple steps to duplicate a channel and it’s assignments as opposed to one step.

As an aside, on one of the Facebook Avantis pages, another user indicated their audio hire company is not adopting Avantis at this time due to these workflow issues. So there must be other users out there with the same opinion an not purchasing these desks because of this.

Thanks.

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

Follow up: I programed my first 30+ input show last night for an upcoming event this weekend, so really got see how the workflow went. This band includes 2 full drum kits. plus bass, 2 guitars, stereo keys, 5 vocals. I have to be honest and say that getting everything setup with all bus assignments, effect sends, pads, phantom power enabled, etc. took a very long time compared to setting up on the Venue with it’s user channel presets. And this is after I created input libraries on Avantis for my commonly used input types and recalled those. In addition to not having the ability to save/recall bus assignments, the inability save/recall things like channel name, color, phantom power, pad, aux send to subs bus/DCA/mute group/subgroup, etc. is really a bummer. it’s a lot of extra button pushes and menus to clean things up after you’ve done the library recall.

On my Venue SC48, I can setup that same show in about 2 minutes because the channel preset recall contains all that information – channel name, sends, bus assignments, pans, phantom, pad, mute groups, etc. This makes the setup lightning fast. Doing the same thing on Avantis because so many channel parameters aren’t recallable, it took me well over a half hour to setup the same show (I do this particular event annually). Granted, I’ll get faster at the desk since I’m new to it, but it won’t be a huge difference since there are many physical changes to make for every recalled input to get them setup correctly.

The copy/paste function also doesn’t capture and recall all channel parameters. So if I setup one vocal channel and want the other vox channels to be identical in name, color, assignments, FX sends, etc., I’m not able to copy/paste all those parameters to other channels, same issue as libraries. With a digital desk like this, that should pretty standard stuff in my opinion – especially comparing against a 15 year old desk. I really hope you guys at A&H can work on this. I really want to like this desk. There’s a lot to like about it. But this issue is definitely hampering my workflow and slowing me way down. I suspect other engineers that use Venue & other desks (an extremely popular desk in N. America) would probably agree. Thanks again for your consideration.

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

There are different topologies for actively balanced lines where the hot and cold lines are actively driven. Unless the topology is “servo balanced,” distortion and output circuit damage is possible if a connection where cold is shorted/jumped to ground is made – a fairly common scenario. I just want to confirm if the outputs are servo balanced. I already know that they aren’t impedance/pseudo balanced. If they were, that would be safe for the scenario I described since there is no active cold driver to ground out.

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

Ok, I found my answer here are far as the type of active balanced output required when driving a single ended/unbalanced output:

https://forums.prosoundweb.com/index.php?topic=111181.0

The output needs to be servo balanced to safely short cold to ground and not lose signal or create distortion. I checked the Avantis specs and they only state “Local analogue outputs shall be provided on 12 balanced XLR sockets.” So A&H engineer folks, are the output servo balanced?

Thanks,
Greg

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

wires are passive. it depends on the following devices

That’s not correct. Only certain topologies of fully active balanced output can handle going into an unbalanced input where the cold is shorted to ground. This connection of cold to ground happens well before the input stage of the downstream device. Transformer coupled balanced outputs are one type that tolerate driving an unbalanced input. With direct active balanced outputs, it depends on the topology of the active drivers and how they’re connected internally.

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

If you trying to stay with your workflow then you have to use gear that supports your workflow.
Choose the right tool for your task…

Some aspects on the Venues are very cool, indeed, but the A&H consoles are just different.

I though this was a feature suggestion forum? I’m merely suggesting a feature which I find to be important. Admittedly I was surprised this feature wasn’t already there. But I suspect A&H wouldn’t have implemented a suggestions forum if they weren’t looking for this type of feedback. I still have the Venue desk and will use it as “the right tool for the task.” But I would like the Avantis to also be more of the “the right tool” since it is a blanks slate as far as programing goes and could have this functionality implemented.

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

Avid has been doing it for 15 years and it’s quite effective. They too have variable bus configurations. I rarely change the bus configuration on my Venue desks, so I’m not sure what happens if you don’t have sub groups and auxes laid out like when a channel was saved. I suspect they just don’t get assigned when things don’t lineup which would make sense. In any case, it’s a feature I’m already missing. If Avid can do it with 15-year-old Windows motherboards and DSP, I suspect it would be a cakewalk for the processing in Avantis. It’s a matter of engineering hours I suspect and feature priority. This one is number one on my personal list.

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

As someone who just took delivery on the Avantis yesterday, I found this limitation very disappointing as well. In my humble opinion, it should be bumped up on the priority list. The cut sheet says “FULLY CONFIGURABLE MIX ARCHITECTURE,” and that’s actually not the case. 42 sounds like a lot of busses, but it’s really not that many when you start adding on stereo matrices and groups. Losing an extra bus here and there adds up fast when you are wanting to only consume a mono bus but wind up consuming 2 instead. It’s not ideal.

At my day job, I work for a broadcast video tech company where most of our products are Xilinx FPGA based, so I can appreciate the complexity of making alterations to the core architecture of them. It’s not easy. But we do it a lot to accommodate relevant and important customer requests. These seems like a pretty important issue, at least to me, because you’re not truly able to fully configure the busses as desired – one of the main reasons I purchased the desk.

Thanks.

[CameronProAudioParticipant]

Well that’s the thing, they’re already loading the next batch of cues from laptop with their 15 year old Yamaha technology. The QU24 and 32 are both more expensive desks than a brand new 01V96VCM (yup, they still make it) but have the same number of scene memories. I’m I really out of line to think that with more modern, lower cost components that A&H could have upped the scene memory a bit? Maybe I am.

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