Once a week, createdigitalmusic‘s Peter Kirn highlights drool-worthy music and audio creation equipment, from essential to oddball. This week’s computer audio control surface, invented by a former magician and priced like a yacht, hits the oddball end.
Finally, an audio control surface that looks like it belongs on a spaceship: the Smart AV Smart Console. The legitimate trouble with big studio-style mixer consoles is that they physically have too many channels, with hundreds of faders adding to their length. Smart AV’s solution is to stretch configurable channels across a touch-sensitive arc on the top of the board. Touch a channel, and the surface intelligently sets mechanized faders and knobs to that channel. Here’s where things get a bit unusual: scrawl indications for your different channels in pen on the arc, and a detachable scanner scans them in to be rendered in brilliant LED lights on the channel strips. Assign and group faders by touch. Wave your hand in the air over mixers and group them without touching the panel at all. The control surface was developed by a former magician, and it shows. The magician attracts enormous crowds each time the product is displayed.
This isn’t entirely new technology: I saw it at AES in October. Since then, though, Smart AV has been rounding up distributors, so it is coming to the US. Think big studios, not home studios: $150,000 is the ballpark for the full console. It’s just a control surface, not a mixer: it’s a front end for systems like Apple Logic Pro. But when I spoke to a product representative informally, SmartAV expressed optimism that the technology could find its way to consumer-grade audio equipment in just a few years. Even before flying cars.
