Yamaha picked a lovely location to present their two-day PM1-D school in Los Angeles, the Sportsman’s Lodge in Studio City. Many people have meetings and weddings there, and you pass a pool full of ducks, geese and swans when you walk in from the back parking lot.

But I was still apprehensive as I arrived, like a little kid on the first day of school. What if I didn’t know anyone, and they were all digital rocket scientists, arguing about complex mathematical formulas, madly scrawled onto a chalkboard?

Then I walked out into the area by the swimming pool for humans, and sitting at a table were, to my great relief, the usual suspects. Their ringleader was a dangerous-looking guy named Mike Hogstrand, head of union sound at Universal Amphitheatre, who brought me in to work some Clair Brothers gigs at the Greek, two years ago.

Next to him were Pete Kudas and Brian Hubbard, who keep an eye on the Clair rig at Universal. Over the next two days, I definitely decided that Pete was the Most Valuable Student, burning through the architecture of the PM1-D, even staying each day until they kicked him out, examining all the functions, intent on running these things for real, ASAP.

Dan Craik, and the Hollywood Bowl’s Terry Klein and Kevin Wapner

Entering the actual room where the PM1-D’s were set up, I was additionally relieved to see Marc Lopez, Yamaha’s software manager, who had given me a tour of the desk at last year’s NSCA in Orlando. Marc is a great teacher! He was paired for this presentation with the similarly gifted Mr. Dan Craik, Yamaha’s hardware project manager.

Other attendees included personnel from the Hollywood Bowl audio team, including Terry Klein and Kevin Wapner, as well as sound company owner Bob Ludwig.

The view over “my” PM1-D

A number of desks had been trucked in as part of a series of classes like this, that were given all over the country. A few of us shared each PM1-D, so that we could follow along with the explanations of system functions. There was also a multitrack digital recorder and a pair of nearfield monitors; each afternoon we were turned loose on a song, to experiment with what we had learned.

First off was some history about the development of the PM1D – how it basically mated the 4K and the 02R, even keeping the familiarity of some of the 4K knob colors. Users told them that it would help to make it as much like the consoles we are all used to using. Really, the control surface, the part that looks like a traditional board, in essence actually functions like a giant mouse, and could have been much more alien looking.

People who are nervous about the PM1D locking up, since they are used to their home computers crashing all the time, are hopefully reassured by the fact that the engine will keep passing audio in whatever scene you were in, even if there is a problem with the control surface (which connects with cables to the actual remote rack containing the “brain” – the DSP-1D engine - and I/O cards.) You can also work around any problems with the control surface, by connecting a laptop directly to the engine.

But, the users I have spoken to report no such problems in the field. We heard about the engineer at Carnegie Hall, who just uses his laptop, and does not even bother setting up the control surface, when there is an event requiring only five or eight mics. I know that Stan Miller runs part of Neil Diamond’s show on his laptop, too, and plans to eventually do it all like that. Now there is a seat kill number that promoters will like – one!

Yamaha’s Marc Lopez and Dan Craik

The control surface is half the weight of a 4K, and addresses 48 channels at a time, each with a fader and a rotary attenuator. An extra card for the engine yields the ability to add a second layer, channels 49 through 96, which the faders are already labelled for. The original plan was for every purchaser to have a double-engine rig, running in what is called “mirror mode,” in which the “B” engine is in “idle,” while the “A” engine is processing. If there is a mishap with the “A” engine, the “B” takes over seamlessly.