Panasonic DA-7mkII Digital Mixing Console

By David Weiss

With all the ways to worry about how the Internet is going to bankrupt musicians - and their engineers, producers, and studios along with them – it’s time to look at the bright side. When put to the task of performing its more basic function as an information-sharing resource of incredible power, the Internet stands to make the world of pro audio more delicious than ever before.

Carl Marinoff and DA-7mkII

For the people at Panasonic, the steady maturing of the Web coincided nicely with their desire to take the DA7 Digital Audio Mixer to the next level. After three years on the market, the DA7 had proved to be a remarkably flexible and portable solution both in the studio and the trenches of live sound, giving users 38 inputs, scene automation, hard disk recording compatibility and stable software.

Improving it meant sending its engineers back to the lab for some hard time, guided mainly by suggestions culled from Panasonic’s careful attention to what its users were saying on the Net.

“My job is increasingly customer-feedback driven, which makes what I do easier,” says Carl Marinoff, Technical Support Specialist/Account Manager for the Panasonic Pro Audio Group. “We can implement a lot of the suggestions that end users come up with, whereas before the Internet we were mainly getting feedback from our retailers. Now we can get it from the end user who says, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if this button were blue instead of red?’

“We have an unofficial user’s site, DA7.com, that now has over 12,000 posts in regards to the DA7. We monitor every single post, as well as any known web group that has anything to do with audio, and take each and every opinion and suggestion into consideration.”

The result is the DA7mkII, which has added improved audio signal control, shortcut keys, advanced MIDI faders, and a host of other enhancements to the board. Capable of operating in tandem mode with another DA7 for a total of up to 76 inputs, the DA7 is a small package that can act like a big desk, which, according to Marinoff, should come as no surprise when you consider its heritage.

“The lineage of the DA7 is from a million dollar, large format mixing console that Panasonic builds in Japan,” he relates. “We didn’t start with a little six channel analog mixer and say, ‘Let’s build a digital mixer.’ We have a background in building digital mixers with as many as 256 inputs. Our experience was in building mixers for live sound reinforcement, recording and broadcast markets. We wanted to take everything we knew about digital and analog mixers and build it into a mixer that was reliable, easy to operate and expandable.”

With Panasonic staking its reputation on product reliability, maintaining a stable working environment for the DA7 was at the top of its list. “Software is the key - anybody can build the hardware,” says Marinoff. “We had a large team of engineers working on the software development, and over the last three years that the DA7 has been available, we have done five software revisions. We’re constantly refining and streamlining the operations of the DA7, and we’re now on version 2.5.”

For further development of the DA7’s ease of operation, Panasonic went to the checklist they culled from the Internet. “What that boils down to is single function buttons, no nested menus, just really good user feedback on ergonomics in the human user interface,” Marinoff asserts. “We do of course have buttons with multiple functions, but our objective was that anything involving mixing audio would have single button functionality, because in a live FOH environment you can’t be looking through menus.”

“In a studio environment, recallability and resetability is there. You can recall all of the functions and parameters of the DA7 with a single button, and it has over 200 internal memories.”

For Marinoff and his team at Panasonic, there’s no time like the present to be in the digital audio game. “The DA7 is an affordable tool that is not a toy, and now is a wonderful time for this board,” he says. “Because of all the proliferation of hard disk recording systems, every manufacturer now has an under-$5,000, 24 bit, 24 track digital recorder that interfaces perfectly with the DA7, which has the capability to monitor 24 digital inputs.

“At Panasonic, we are now focused solely on digital audio. We see this as the direction that the market is going, and future development is going to be very exciting.”

(Editor’s note: When Carl Marinoff told me at NAMM that the DA-7 digital board was used in live work, such as casino showrooms in Las Vegas, I was very surprised. I had stereotyped it in my mind as a studio desk, knowing that Little Feat had recorded their last album through one. So I asked David Weiss – a fine writer from New York, not the co-founder of Was Not Was – to follow up on the process that went into the mkII version of the DA7. – C.K.)