#What is vca in mixing live sound full

That gives the operator a visual reference of where the faders were the last time he/she was on that layer or in that operation mode. Some digital audio consoles go a step further and provide motorized faders. It makes the sound operatorвЂ™s job much easier.ДЄ DCA is a Digitally Controlled AmplifierДCAвЂ™s are found on digital audio consoles, and offer the same types of functional advantages that a VCA does for an analog console, simply done in the digital audio realm rather than analog. But itвЂ™s still a great feature to have on a console.

Sweet, eh? Of course even with a standard VCA console, the faders arenвЂ™t motorized, so they donвЂ™t actually move. If you press the Mute button on the submaster, it is just as though you hit Mute on each individual channel. If you pull down that submaster, it is just as though you reached over and pulled down each individual channel fader assigned to that VCA submaster. Okay, so what if this was an analog console fitted with VCAвЂ™s on each channel? Now when you pull down the submaster fader it is simply controlling the amount of DC control voltage allowed to reach the individual VCAвЂ™s on each channel. We would rather use the submasters as they were intended. The way to defeat that of course is to reach over and mute all of those individual vocal mic channels, or pull their faders down. those individual channel faders are still up, meaning the audio signal is still feeding the auxiliary sends for the postfade effects send.ДЇollowing me? With this relationship it is entirely likely that any or all of those vocal mics may pick up some sounds on the platform, which feeds them to the effects device, and your congregation will hear lots of highly reverberant noise or chatter. Now with the analog console, pulling the submaster down means we wonвЂ™t hear the direct sound over the system. Everything is good, the mix is going well, we reach the end of the song and to avoid any distraction of the vocal mics between songs we pull that submaster fader all the way down. Now, we decide that we want to group those vocals on a submaster so that we can control the overall level of the vocals with one submaster fader. And if we were to pull those channel faders all the way down, the direct sound would go away and the reverberant sound would go away as well. Since the reverb send is postfade, it will follow our fader movements on those vocal channels. The output of that effects device comes back into the console (somewhere) and we hear reverb on the vocals. So we dial up one of our postfade auxiliary sends on those channels that feed the reverb effects unit. And letвЂ™s say that we want to add some reverb to those vocals. LetвЂ™s say that channel five through nine have our vocalistsвЂ™ mics going through them.

So in this case the fader controls the amount of DC voltage being applied to the VCAвЂ™s control input, which in turn raises or lowers the strength of the audio signal going through the VCA.Д«ack to our analog console for a moment. (One for each channel.) A DC voltage is used to adjust the gain of that VCA. Instead, it actually travels through a small audio amp inside the console. With a VCA console, the audio signal doesnвЂ™t go through the fader at all. Pull the fader down to the bottom and it provides the maximum resistance, meaning the maximum attenuation of the audio signal, so no audio signal goes through.

#What is vca in mixing live sound full

With the fader pushed all the way to the top of its throw, the resistance is zero, so the full audio signal strength goes through. As you adjust the fader, it uses a resistive element to vary the strength of the audio signal on that channel.

You could think of the fader as a rotary volume control stretched out flat. In a typical analog audio console, the audio signal actually travels through each channel fader. VCA stands for Voltage Controlled Amplifier.