Remember when everyone switched to digital consoles? You won’t need to carry those racks of gear anymore. No more outboard eq, comps, gates, effects etc. Less truck space equals fuel savings and less money for trucking. Fewer seats taken up means more money for the promoter. Everyone wins!
Uh, yeah. Maybe not so much. Even now that I’m often on shows with the best digital consoles in the world, guest engineers are still carrying outboard gear. Hardware preamps, compressors, effects. Sometimes a laptop full of plugins and an analog i/o interface. And now it seems that the Waves Live package is gaining ground. With platform specific and generic interface options, Waves Live can provide a plethora of plugins for your digital console. But, what do you need to make it work? A Sound Grid Server, Host computer, Interface cards for your console or a generic i/o, plus all the relevant software and plugins. So here we are once more, buying more gear to add to our supposedly self contained consoles.
Truly, everything old is new again.