I would love to see an IP 16 control surface that fits into a 19" Rack form factor for mounting in a mixer road case. I would pair this with a mini computer or laptop for running director and controlling a dLive mixrack over Wifi. I looked into a waves fit controller but they are discontinued and 3rd party options do not work with director anyway. There’s frequent times in mid-level shows when I don’t have ethercon available to me for running a CTI1500.
Aren’t you supposed to be using a wire for those anyway?
Over the years our church has run the gamut from running a “surfaceless” DLive system for years to now having a physical Surface. Before we had the Surface, I tried a number of different things to get “physical faders” to use with our system. I’ll discuss what we did and the pros and cons of each setup.
Shortly after moving to the DLive platform, we got a Waves Fit Controller and used it with Mixing Station via Midi. I would use Mixing Station for about 95% of my needs, but I still needed Director running as well for that extra 5%. The benefit to this setup is that it is relatively inexpensive to get physical faders working with a DLive system. Mixing Station also supports multiple Midi controllers, so you could easily have multiple Behringer X-Touch Extenders or Waves Fit Controllers, etc to have as many faders as you desired. This setup would also meet your desire to have your control surface have a “wireless” connection to the DLive system. While the Midi controller needs a hardwired connection, you can use USB to plug it into your host computer while that computer can be connected to the network (and by extension to the DLive system) over WiFi - just like using the Director software.
The downside to this system is that it was more confusing to use given that you had two different software interfaces and you had to know when it was appropriate to use each one. Furthermore, there is no interaction between MS and Director, so selecting a channel on one system wouldn’t also select it in the other system. Overall this was no problem for me, but some of the other volunteers who were not used to running MS or Director had more trouble using the system. Honestly if it wasn’t for the need to have a “simple” system for our volunteers to use, I think we would have stuck with the Mixing Station/Midi controller option long term.
After a while, I found a screaming good deal on some IP6 and IP8 controllers and we did away with the Mixing Station/Waves Fit Controller setup. We used three IP8 controllers at FOH along with a computer running Director the DLive software. The IP8 controllers were set up to work with the “Surface” (which in this case was the Director software instance). Overall this system worked well and was much easier for our volunteers to use because they only needed to interact with a single software. We also had the computer set up to automatically login and start the Director software when the computer was turned on, so the only thing they needed to do was “connect” the Director software to the Mixrack (which they did forget to do sometimes). My second biggest complaint about the IP8 units is their lack of any encoders and very few buttons. The Waves Fit was actually more user friendly because of the variety of different controls. My biggest complaint about them however has to be the cost. There is no way I would pay full price for these units. I was lucky enough to find them on the used market for well under their normal market value and therefore I didn’t mind purchasing them.
Finally after years of searching/waiting, we found the right “deal” (can you see the pattern emerging) on a used Surface and we have now moved to using it instead of the IP8s. Obviously having a physical surface is the best solution by far. I was actually surprised at how much nicer it was to be back mixing on a normal console and how much faster it was to “get things done” vs using the hardware/software hybrid systems we had been using.
Having a larger IP unit with more faders - especially one with encoders and more programmable buttons - would be really nice to have. But A&H isn’t going to want to make the device “too perfect” or it would likely take away sales from the C1500 and other Surfaces. I think there are a lot of people that would rather spend $3500 on an IP12/16 that does 80% of what a C1500 does vs spending 12k on the Surface. Based on these factors, I don’t really expect A&H to produce such a device. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath for it to be released either!
They are “supposed” to be hardwired. However, ever since they’ve been out, I’ve been using an IP8 connected to a Wi-Fi extender and it has worked flawlessly. So you could connect a switch to the extender and then connect multiple IP-8s that way. This, of course, is NOT the supported manner of connecting. Use at your own risk.
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I’ve never thought of doing that, but it makes sense that it works fine. The A&H IP 1/4/6/8 devices use the standard TCP/IP protocol to communicate, so they send/receive data packets the same was as any other network device. The wireless bridges/extenders are obviously designed to work with TCP/IP traffic. If the wireless bridges/extenders work with other devices, they should work with the A&H IP devices without any issues too.