Mixing sound for conferences, trade shows or industrials in hotel ballrooms isn’t fun, sexy or artistic but it does pay the bills. Hitting queues and flying by the seat of your pants as the corporate types, who are not experienced platform presenters, may make your hair prematurely grey. The good news is the task of riding gain over multiple mikes in a Q&A session or round table became much easier thanks to Dan Dugan.
In the early days with many simultaneous presenters, we had to rely on our reflexes to raise the mic for the person talking. If you had all of the mics up at once, they would either feedback or sound really honky. Dugan was working on this problem as early as 1970 and one day: “I was messing around with logarithmic level detection, seeing what would happen if I used the sum of all the inputs as a reference. That’s when I accidentally came upon the system. It was really discovered, not invented. I didn’t really know what I had, just that it worked like gangbusters.”
Dugan moved inside Yamaha’s QL-series of mixers in March 2014, as an option on the graphic equalizer processing page. This internal version could mix 8 or 16 microphones.
Now the Dugan plug-in is as easy as a soft patch, turn them on, turn them up and pay attention (optional).