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XL8 Control Centre
Operator Manual
Chapter 3: XL8 Control Centre Description
The XL8 Control Centre is built on a robust Midas steel frame chassis similar to those
used for established Midas analogue products. The frame houses five bays, each of
which is a discrete hardware module that can operate independently of its neighbour.
Collectively, the bays provide the primary mixing needs of the engineer.
Each bay has its own power supply, control surface modules, control surface
processors, GUI processor and GUI screen. The control surface and GUI processors for
each bay are separately connected to the network on duplicated Ethernet links. Also
housed within each bay are dual redundant master controller processors and dual
redundant high-speed network routers (eight AES50 connections each).
The control surface of the XL8 Control Centre is populated with instantly recognisable
controls that are logically distributed in major sections, so that all the controls you need
to access most of the time are always on the control surface, while the remainder are
only one action away. All I/O meters are permanently on display, both on the control
surface and the GUI (if configured), to give instant monitoring feedback. The layout
also allows two operators to work on the XL8 Control Centre simultaneously.
The principle of XL8 Control Centre operation is based on the concept of colours and
groups rather than ‘layering’ or ‘paging’, which is the case with most digital consoles on
the market today. With so many channels available it is far easier to remember them
by their group colour and name rather than by their channel number.
Multiple hardware faults are tolerated by the XL8 Control Centre without loss of audio
control due to the dual redundancy and N+1 methods incorporated in the system. This
is further helped by the modular nature of the bays and GUI independence. So if a
whole bay fails others can take over or be used instead, and any of the GUI screens can
be used to operate the whole XL8 Control Centre, even if none of the control surface
hardware is working.
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