gillspice

That would be a dream come true from a soundguy's point of view. Convincing the musicians of the value would most likely be a whole different ball of wax....."You want me to leave my marshall stack at home and plug into what?!?"

I intend the system to be generic, meaning not specific to one group of performers, so no, I don't have plans to get into MIDI controlled guitar gear.

My goal with making a set of preamps with a MIDI gain control is so that I don't have to have someone on stage to adjust the gain during soundcheck, and also so that gain settings can be stored and recalled.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it doesn't look like the gain of the preamps on the ADA8000 can be adjusted remotely.

Having monitor mix controls for each band member is a great idea! That would be a huge benefit without adding much complexity to the system as a whole. Really the only additional work would be contructing the control panels.

I would like to use a midibox for live sound reinforcement. My basic idea is to use a rackmount PC on stage, with a PCI multiple I/O soundcard (such as a delta 1010lt, or several of them if more I/O is needed). All of the onstage mics would go into the PC, where all the mixing and signal processing would take place, then the mixdown outputs would come out, and would go into power amps in the same rack, and out to speakers. So really the mixer would be on stage, but it would be controlled remotely using a midibox. I figure that the onstage PC will have no monitor, but will have a wireless ethernet connection to a laptop. UltraVNC could be used on the laptop to remotely control the onstage PC. The Midibox would connect via midi to the laptop, and then ipMidi could be used in order to achieve MIDI over IP so that the midi box could control the mixing ap on the stage PC remotely. So basically it would be kind of like having a traditional mixer with a wireless snake, only the audio itself wouldn't actually leave the stage. As far as the mixing program used on the stage, virtual console could be used, or cubase or whatever. It seems to me that the only missing link in this idea is a set of MIDI controlled mic preamps, since the soundcard inputs would be line level. I have started on a design for a MIDI controled preamp that will use a midibox core, DOUT, and a TI INA217 chip for the mic pre. Does this idea appeal to anyone else?