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I am Dan Dugan of Dan Dugan Sound Design in San Francisco.
Many years ago, I was working in a theatre
and dealing with many live microphones.
And you know in any application we have lots of live microphones.
It's fairly difficult to operate
because you cannot have them all up at the same time.
You get too much noise.
You get too much feedback.
Especially with something unscripted like a political debate or talk show.
You never know who is going to talk next.
So the sound operator gets embarrassed,
because inevitably they miss some cues.
So I figure out a way to develop an automatic microphone mixer
that would bring up the microphones when they were supposed to be on
and take them down when they weren't
I patented this and produced about 60 models of my own 1st model,
and then I licensed it to Altec Corporation.
They made many for a long period of time.
I knew this process that I had developed was applicable to many different situations.
The only thing we were doing was in the church closet,
as it were, what's called installed sound.
So when the patent expired and the contract ended,
I was able to show the world how good this process was.
I made automatic microphone mixers
that were an adapter box that went along with your mixing console.
So that you can plug in the Dugan into your mixing console.
It would give you mic automatic mixing along with your favorite mic pre-amps
and your favorite EQ and everything else like that.
This has been a very successful approach at the high end professional sound.
What I want to show you today
is one that I'm making specially in collaboration with the Yamaha corporation.
This is the Dugan-MY16.
This is a plug-in board which goes into the back of your Yamaha console.
Those who use Yamaha know that they come with these slots
and this plugs in the slot in the back.
It gives you 16 channels of Dugan automatic microphone mixing.
You have to hear it to understand what that means.
So what I am going to do is we're going to put on headphones.
Listen to what it actually does.
We have four live microphones here.
Yours and mine, and you each have a microphone.
They are plugged in to this console in a normal way,
and patched into the insert points of the 4 channels.
It's the slot patch which is containing a Dugan-MY16 card.
We are wearing headphones, so we cannot hear ambient noise as well as possible.
We are going to add a little extra ambient noise.
So we can hear what the automatic mixing does with the ambient noise.
So come over here and I will show you something else.
This is a Java applet that comes with the product for free.
You can download it from the website also.
It is a remote control panel that gives you access to a lot of controls on the unit.
Now you don't have to use it.
You can just plug it in to use right out of the box.
But if you run the software,
you have a lot of interesting things that show you more information about it
and things that you can do.
The main thing you see here is the gain meters.
These are showing the gains that are being applied to each channel.
You can see, when I am talking, that my gain is coming up full to normal gain
and the other channels are being ducked.
And then when you talk,
L: Hello, how are you doing?
OK. When you talk,
J: Hello, how are you?
And when you talk,
A: Hello, how are you?
Whenever anybody talks, they came up full and all the other channels get faded down.
Now look at what happens when nobody talks.
They all come to medium gains
that add up to the gain of one open microphone.
If you listen to the ambient noise in the room,
when I am talking, that noise is coming through this microphone.
When I stop, that is coming through all the microphones.
Now you might think I'm kidding you with a bunch of expensive equipment here.
So what I am going to do is bypass the system.
OK, that's the amount of ambience you have with four open microphones.
OK. Now notice, when I go back to automatic,
My voice stays the same. Your voice stays the same. Say hello.
All mics are just as hot, but they are not piling on top to each other.
You could have 20 microphones,
but the sound would be just the same as like if you had handed the microphone around.
There is no threshold and no gating... (repeat)
That's what the Dugan speech system can do for you.
L: What happens if multiple people try to talk at the same time?
OK. Let me count and you try to interrupt me.
So that works.
J: What is a group?
That is a good question.
Let's lose the ambient noise.
Thank you. We don't need that anymore.
The groups divide the system up into different automatic mixers.
For example, I can put these first two channels on to group B,
so we have two 2-channel automatic mixers.
You and I are on one mixer. See I am pushing you down.
We are not affecting the other two because they are a separate automatic mixer.
And when you talk,
So this comes into play when you have many units linked together.
Say you had 32 channels with two of these units,
and you wanted to put 21 of them in one system,
and you could put another 5 in another system.
You could put 21 on group A and the other 5 on group B.
I will put them back into group A for now.
A: What is the weight parameter?
Thank you very much.
That's the side chain gain which goes into the control system.
It doesn't directly affect the sound of the channel.
So I can fade this up and down.
You see it's not directly affecting my channel,
but it is affecting what it's feeding into the control system.
We can see that when there is ambient room noise here.
For example, somebody was a loud talker,
and you turned down their pre-amp on the console.
You turned that down 5dB, and you turn the weight up 5dB,
and that would bring these back to balancing during the ambient noise condition.
Everybody would have equal access to the system when they want to talk.
L: Are there any presets that I can use to mute everything at one time?
There is a preset here in the master section.
It does bring everything to the combination,
and set by these preset buttons on each channel.
Let me tell you about these 3 buttons on each channel first.
We have a manual button for each channel.
What that does is just turn the channel on.
So now we have a single channel up and 3-channel automatic mixer for your other three.
I'm going to put that back to automatic.
If I click the mute, you can do a quick fade.
So using these 3 buttons during production, you never do anything ugly.
It always does a quick fade.
You can preset these modes.
When you click this preset button, it will go back to those.
So say, if I had muted you other guys,
so I am going to mute you,
Now you notice you didn't hear any change in the mix, but you guys can't talk now.
Try. You are all dead.
When I wanted to bring back to my standard combination,
I just hit the preset button again.
You didn't hear any change in my voice but you are all back on.
Thank you very much for your attention.
If you want more information about this product,
please see the Yamaha website or the dandugan.com website.