Studer Vista 1

1. There are two power supplies for this desk, one is the main power supply and the other is a redundant power supply, this means if there is any problems with the main the redundant one kicks in.

2. Mic/Line inputs: These XLR sockets accept audio into the desk. These are all accessible via the GPO patchbay. They are also all normalled (connected in default) to the wall boxes on the studio floor. So when you plug a mic into a wallbox in Studio A it will appear on a channel on the desk. The GPO patchbay will tell you which wallbox input relates to which desk input. A copy of this document is included in the guide.

3. Line Out. 32 line outputs on XLR. This is where audio leaves the desk, so when you hear audio in the gallery it’s coming out of these sockets. The GPO patchbay has the available outputs which can be patched to various locations within the building.

4. D21 Card slot. This is a card slot that we have installed a MADI card in. This is how we connect the Studer Stage Box.

5. Area of other audio and communication connections.

6. Out main for attaching the computer screen.

Because of the GPO patchbay it’s rare that you would have to unplug anything from the desk but do take some time to make sure you understand how the patchbay relates to the desk inputs and outputs (i/o’s).

We’ll now turn our attention to the front of the desk and look at the various sections we can see in front of us.

Sections

This term refers to the way the desk can control more channels that it can display at any one time. In order to do this you have to think about the desk as having multiple layers or ‘Sections’ that you can access by pressing the sections buttons. You can either jump between any of the 6 fader bay sections or use the arrows to navigate through each on. Most of the time you will work on section one but it’s worth noting that with just one press of a button you may be taken to another section that has none of your channels

The same is true for the Control Bay. In order to access the faders of control groups, auxiliary channels or vistamix you have to use the buttons labelled ‘Fader Page’. The buttons labelled 1-4 allow you to choose which group of faders you can control in the Control Bay. This is kind of a fundamental design feature of digital mixing desks, if Studer had given each available channel a fader there would be 160 faders instead of 30 so you can see why this has become the norm.

Inputs, Channels and Channel Strips

In it’s default state the desk is set up to receive input one, by this I mean and audio signal plugged into input one of the back of the desk, and pass that audio to channel 1 on the desk. This remains true for the first 32 channels. The problem with this is that’s rare that you will want to use channels sequentially and more likely that you will be using a mixture of channels.

Remember the wall boxes in Studio A and how they all feed into channels on the desk? Well imagine how unintuitive it would be to have audio sources appearing all over the desk. Thankfully there is a simple way of reordering the channels you are using so that they appear in a much more user friendly order on the Fader Bay.

This is another trait of digital mixing consoles, no matter where you plug something in the back of the desk you can have it appear on any fader on the desk. This is an example of what’s referred to as ‘Soft Patching’. To fully understand how this work you need to break the link between the input section at the back and the channels in the Fader Bay. Once you severe that link you can start to see that you can put a channel anywhere you want to you should be thinking about designing the desk layout to suit your production rather than being held back by using a desk layout that was designed for someone else's production.

To make audio appear on a fader you have to know three things:

Which physical Input is the audio signal being received on? This is be decided by which wallbox socket you plug into or if you are plugging something in, in the gallery then the GPO Patchbay will have that information on.

Which channel is that physical input patch to? Each physical input has to be assigned to a channel, if you are using a stereo source such as a laptop, you can assign the two mono inputs to a stereo channel.

Which channel strip is that channel assigned to? Once a physical input has been assigned to a channel you have to decide where that channel appears on the desk. The term channel strip refers to individual faders within the Fader Bay.

Assigning physical inputs to channels will be covered in a later document but for now I want to focus on assigning channels to channel strips and moving existing channels to other channel strips.

Gain and Level

Gain is added before the fader so that all signals are comparable with each other, when adding gain you should aim to have the loudest peak of the signal entering the orange section of the meter. if you do this with all of the signals coming into the desk you will then have no trouble mixing them with the faders.

Output and Bussing

Now we have audio at the correct level we can think about where we would go after the fader. You do this by assigning the channel a bus. Most commonly this is the Master Bus but it can also be other groups or Vista Mix.

ACTION! Assigning an output to a channel.

• Above the fader of the channel you would like to assign an output to there is a button called ‘BUS ASN’. Press this button and a menu will appear in the display above the channel. This is a touch screen display so you can now assign the the selected channel to an output. Choose Master 1L and 1R.

• Audio will now be passed to the Master Fader in the Control Bay section of the desk.

• Take a look at the other options in the Bus Assign menu, it’s here that you can send audio signals to groups and vistamix. This will be covered in more detail in another guide.

Labelling

Labelling your tracks helps you to keep track of which mics are assigned to which channels. In the days before digital desks you would put a strip of tape along the desk and name the tracks with a marker pen. Digital desks allow you to type names into the tracks so you can find specific channels quickly and easily.

ACTION! Name a track.

• Click on the track you want to name.

• Go to the GC on the computer screen and click in the name field.

• Type the name you want to use into this box on the screen.

Faderglow

Another neet way of organising your tracks is to use colours to distinguish different sections on the desk. For example all your radio mics might be one colour and any stereo sources might be another.

ACTION! Colour your tracks.

• Open the strip setup menu.

• Select the tracks you want to assign a colour to.

• Right click on this selection and choose a colour from the Faderglow menu.

Mute Groups

When you are running the desk during a show one of the most important responsibilities is making sure only certain sources go to air and signals that aren’t meant to be heard are not allowed through. This is where the use of mute buttons comes in. The mute button stops any audio passing through the channel strip, using these buttons you can control what the audience is hearing. If you have only a few sources you can manage the mute buttons by pressing individual buttons but you soon run out of fingers. This is where we can introduce the idea of mute groups. A mute group allows you to save a selection of channels that can all be muted at the same time. Using this method you can assign any number of tracks to a mute group and then mute these channels using one button in the mute group section.

ACTION! - Assigning channels to a mute group.

• Press the mute buttons of the channels that you want to be in the mute group.

• Press the ‘Groups’ button

• Now press one of the mute group buttons.

• A box will appear on the computer screen asking whether you want to ‘Assign Currently Muted Channels to Group’. This means you can assign all the channels that are currently muted will be add to the group.

• The other option available is ‘Clear Saves’ this means that any tracks that were previously saved to this mute group will be cleared from the group.