Handbook for Sound Engineers

Consoles 951

producer. It would even be possible to run the console
entirely from the screen, with no regard or need for the
hardware surface.

And so in a few short paragraphs, we’ve moved from

a knob per function to no knobs at all. Already in the

fairly young game of control surface design sans fron-

tiers manufacturers are rightly taking the measure of

their cliental and producing surfaces much closer to

their actual requirements than ever before, liberated by

digital control. It is very encouraging. There is no

universal perfect control surface solution; seemingly

polar protagonists of the knob-per-function and

fader-and-a-button approaches are equally exactly

correct.

25.16.13.3 Control Surface Intelligence

Even if there is no signal processing going on in the

same box, the control surface still has an awful lot going

on inside it, Fig. 25-124. Typically there will be a large

embedded controller, or even a PC-style microcom-

puter to administer things such as control surface host;

it will likely be of the x86 persuasion, or a capable

Figure 25-123. Wheatstone Evolution 6 Console. Courtesy
Wheatstone Corp.

Figure 25-124. Control surface control architecture

LCD

screen

Graphics

controller

Micro

Switches

Resolvers

LEDs

Meters

Faders

A/D O/P Sub-panelcontroller(micro, FPGA)

Motors

Flash RAM

Hard

disk

RAM

86

Microcontroller

Control surface

host

Switches

Resolvers

LEDs

Meters

Faders

Motors

A/D O/P

Control

changes

External control

(keyboard, laptop)

Displays

metering

Parameter changes

Metering

Ethernet

interface

Timecode

MIDI

Sub-panelcontroller(micro, FPGA)

(as above)