The College of Southern Nevada Installs Solid State Logic 48-Channel Duality Fuse at its North Campus

Massive integration at 'the biggest program in Nevada' also includes an SSL Fusion outboard processor and a facility-wide Dante network

Las Vegas, Nevada, June 13, 2024 — The College of Southern Nevada (CSN) has installed a Solid State Logic Duality Fuse SuperAnalogue™ console in the main control room at the Recording Studio Facilities at its North Las Vegas Campus. The 48-channel Duality Fuse, which came online for the 2023 fall semester, is being used to instruct students enrolled in the Audio Recording Technology Program at the college, which attracts more than 30,000 students annually to its three campuses in and around Las Vegas.

John Jacobson, who has been at the college for 24 years, reports that CSN offers a 30-credit Certificate of Achievement in Music Business and Technology as part of the Music Program within the Department of Fine Arts. “We’re the biggest program in Nevada,” says Jacobson, who was appointed Audio Recording Technology Program Director 18 months ago. “About 400 students go through it each year.”

The facility’s main control room was previously occupied by an SSL AWS 900 console that was installed in 2005. Between the main studio, which can accommodate a 50-piece orchestra, and a large iso room, there are 35 analogue microphone lines to the main control room, with additional lines available on a Dante network. “Our AWS only has 24 inputs,” Jacobson says. So when funding became available, after evaluating the large-format analog consoles on the market, he ordered a 48-channel Duality Fuse with SSL δelta control and integrated Fusion coloration processor and moved the AWS 900 to another room.

Any number of mixing consoles from various brands offer similar functionality, but Jacobson gravitated toward SSL and the Duality Fuse because, he says, “It sounds accurate. It's really about the quality of the components, and how good the mic preamps are. I also like the dedicated DAW controls and the fact that it will work with any DAW, and with either a Windows PC or a Macintosh.”

Jacobson had his first opportunity to use the new SSL Duality console on a series of commercial tracking dates shortly before the new semester started, recording a classic organ trio and, for a documentary project, eight horn players, eight singers and a rhythm section. He doesn’t market the studio’s availability for commercial sessions: “It’s word of mouth — former students who want to book time and people who knew me when I had my own commercial studio or as a professional musician playing shows around town for the past 40 years.”

In a testament to the performance and character of the Duality mic preamps, he reports, “We have a bunch of outboard mic pre’s, but with only a couple exceptions we used all SSL mic pre’s on the sessions.” As for the Duality’s EQ section, he says, “I'm familiar with it because we’ve been using an SSL AWS 900 for 18 years and the EQ is almost identical”.

Plus, Jacobson continues, “Having a dynamic section on every channel with a compressor and a gate/expander is also great.” During the tracking dates, he says, he experimented with the console’s integrated Fusion processor, which provides six analogue coloration tools. “I did what I would call in-session mastering,” he says, sweetening the playback mix for the musicians. In particular, he says, “With the violet EQ I could add some ‘air band’ at 12 kHz or higher. The compressor will do parallel compression, which I do a lot. I can add not just the Fusion, but also the Stereo Buss Compressor on the Duality, in either order. That's a cool thing, because you can try it both ways to see which you like better. And the musicians liked the stereo image control.”

The Duality Fuse console is ideal for an educational environment, he believes, not least because it follows a one-knob-per-function design philosophy. “It has its digital features but it’s primarily an analogue mixing console and it's designed in a traditional, easy to understand way. Students pick up on it really fast,” he says. That enables the college’s students to take what they have learned on the Duality Fuse and work on any mixing console anywhere, he says.

Jacobson, who leans toward an old school approach to recording by combining great microphones, careful mic placement and first-rate musicians and instruments, says that he appreciates the ability to define the input path on the Duality Fuse. “You can set it up for a real purist approach, where it's just mic pre in, straight to the direct output. But because we had a fair amount of bleed on the sessions, because everybody was basically playing in one room, I set all the channels to post-EQ, pre-fader. That way, by pushing ‘EQ In’ on any channel the high-pass filters came into play, and I could take the low frequencies out of the high instruments, like the trumpets.”

Jacobson might have been tempted to get a larger Duality Fuse for CSN but for one issue: “We got 48 channels because we couldn’t fit more in our control room,” he jokes. In addition to offering tracking through its 48 microphone preamps and EQ sections, he notes, Duality’s split mode architecture, supporting two inputs per channel strip, has an additional benefit. “Another advantage of having 48 channels is that if we have a lot more tracks in Pro Tools then we can align the outputs and bring them up on pairs of faders. At that point, the Duality becomes a monstrous summing amplifier with all kinds of features,” including EQ, gate, expander, and compressor/limiter on every input module.

The new console was installed during the summer after renovations performed by in-house technician Donnie Whitbeck that included implementing a facility-wide Dante network and reworking two equipment racks, the analogue patchbays and the monitor system in the main control room. The carpeting, paint and acoustical treatment were also refreshed. Jacobson, Whitbeck and the staff also repurposed an iso room and relocated the AWS 900 into the new third control room and dedicated recording space, where it can also access sources over the Dante network.

“Through John's vision, he has been able to make a contemporary audio environment with all his vintage equipment, from 1970s keyboards to two-inch and two-track tape machines,” technician Donnie Whitbeck says. “A student can come in and learn how to use an analog synth and have all their stuff tied together through Dante. Out of all the places in Nevada, nobody's tied together the gamut of recording equipment from the 1970s to 2023 before.”

“This program is almost vocational in a way,” Jacobson says. “People in the industry might be using a Duality or something else, and a lot of recording studios are doing everything in-the-box. We could have done that, but it made more sense to do this. We can integrate old equipment, new equipment and anything in between”.

About Solid State Logic
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