Dugan Technologies Abound at Prolight + Sound

Technologies from Dan Dugan Sound Design, the originator of automatic microphone mixing technology, have been integrated into audio products from three major manufacturers and were featured on several stands at the recent Prolight + Sound convention in Germany.

New from Yamaha are QL Series mixers, unveiled at Prolight + Sound. Their 16 channels of Dugan Speech System automatic mixing are incorporated as a standard in these new products, allowing the user to quickly insert Dugan processing for automatically optimized microphone gain distribution. Along with automatically managing gain of live microphones, the system effectively reduces feedback, studio noise, and comb filtering to allow operators to concentrate on overall system performance.

Integrated Dugan mixing comes as a successor to the Dugan-MY16 plug-in card, jointly released by Yamaha and Dugan in 2011. The Dugan-MY16 is compatible with the Yamaha 01V96, DM1000, 02R96, DM2000, M7CL, LS9, DSP5D, PM5D, and DME24/64N. It also incorporates the Dugan Speech System for management of multiple live mics. The Dugan-MY16 card is available from Yamaha distributors worldwide.

Also on display at Prolight + Sound was the Dugan Automixer plug-in from Waves Audio, a software emulation of the Dugan Speech System for Waves MultiRack Native and MultiRack SoundGrid systems. Like all Dugan automatic mixing controllers, this software automatically manages the gains of multiple microphones in real-time to create fast, transparent cross-fades. It dramatically reduces feedback, studio noise, and comb filtering from adjacent mics without introducing sonic artifacts.

The Dugan-VN16 plug-in card was developed and released during the past year in partnership with Avid. This 16-channel automatic mixing controller plugs into a slot on selected Avid digital mixers and patches into the Avid's mic channel insert points. The Dugan-VN16 uses the Dugan Speech System to detect which mics are being used and makes fast, transparent crossfades. It may be configured with 16 automixing channels or eight automixing channels and eight channels of ADAT I/O and may be linked with up to seven other Dugans to expand the number of microphones in the system.