TASCAM DM-3200 / DM-4800 as Broadcast Console ?

[AshokanKid]

Looked around, searched back through the archives & found nothing specific on this.

I may want to press my own DM-3200 console into service (at times) as a broadcast type of mixer. Radio station / interview style situation, having guests in the studio.

One of the main functions missing from a "normal" board that broadcast consoles have as standard, is to mute or dim the studio monitors when a guest mic is activated.

The host may have cans on, but typically guests do not, so this automatic muting of the studio monitor feed is required as soon as one of the guest mics goes hot.

May be a number of ways to do this, perhaps the easiest is to simply mute (or lower) the studio feed manually. I've got to look at the DM-3200 carefully, but there may be a way to use the on-board dynamics ducking (side chain triggering) to make this happen.

I know that the DM-3200 is fairly complex in it's capability & wonder if there is this functionality built in somewhere. Would not surprise me. Is anyone using one of these mixers in a broadcast type of setting?

Thanks . . . and Rock On ~!

SC

 

[Sampler1]

I think I might have the solution even if I'm late getting here. I just purchased a DM-3200 and expect to use it for mostly Broadcasting. I was using a Mackie 24x8 and what I did was to fabricate a cutoff switch with 12Volt relays and just use a 12V power pack as the supply voltage. I just connect in line with the studio monitors. All you need to do is push a button.
Probably just a simple speaker switch would work also.

What I am trying to figure is how to do Ducking with the DM-3200.

Regards

 

[Will Miho]

Well in television broadcasting, you could just send a mix minus to studio monitors, with remotes and tapes etc. in them but no studio mics. The upside of that is if the talent's ifb's go down they can still continue without affecting air. You do have to set the positioning and levels of your studio monitors properly, and I use expansion gates on the mics. I did this without complaints from remotes for many years at a major cable news joint.

The other more radio purposed thing you could do is assign your microphone group buss to a trigger, and use that trigger to close gates on all your other busses, remotes buss, phones buss, tape buss, music buss etc. You would have to assign those other groups to physical channel faders so you would have the gates.
I have not done this, but I think on the input routing page you have to use the "Loopback" option so you can assign a buss as a source to the dynamic triggers. You may have to link a pair of your physical group channels to get triggers to appear as an option on the gates, I'm not sure.
Typically in TV setups we would create group faders for each element, and process them as a group. If you are doing that already this might fit in your flow. Expanders by the way, can work fine as gates.

Will Miho