One of the highlights of InfoComm was reconnecting with Phil Wagner at the Violet Audio booth. We’re both veterans and have crossed the usual paths over the many years while he was president at SSL and Focusrite. Now he’s back in the president chair with a passion project at Violet Audio.
He says it was serendipitous, a case of seeing Danny Olesh’s disruptive dMix 128 product and tapping in. Olesh was best known to me for his time as CTO at Mackie in the early 2020s, building the DLZ Creator that drove the Rode acquisition. What I didn’t know about was his decades before that as a live sound engineer, coder, synth guy, and founder of SM Pro Audio, which is under the hood of multiple HARMAN products since the 2015 acquisition.
As a serial audio entrepreneur, Olesh has clearly long made the products he wanted to use, and that’s clear in the ambitious dMix that hooked Phil in. Watching Olesh demo it on the InfoComm booth, I can see the temptation. It’s not often you get to see that intensity of invention and that throughline of engineer and R&D.
It’s bound to be a controversial product. On the one hand, it’s another business disrupter—Olesh knows how to make products that are commercially competitive. So the dMix rocks the boat in two ways. Well, it kind of blows up the boat on price per channel with 128 channels and 88 DSP buses in 1RU for $6000. The details of how are pretty fascinating, but that’s for another time.
The follow-on paradigm shift is that all of these channels can be anything. The processors don’t care what the signal is; it’s all down to the user to determine, like a kind of digital drag-and-drop LEGO set. And then you control your creation from anything with a web browser (or multiple browsers can share the load if you want to set it up that way). It can be all digital all the time.
And that’s the other part of the inevitable controversy. People like faders. In a nod to that, hardware is apparently in development for it. And it supports OSC and MIDI so you can plug in a fader. And it natively talks to QSC and Crestron.
But/and that’s not exactly the point. Olesh is a live sound engineer; he’s not an R&D guy solving a problem by perverting a real-world workflow. He believes that the tradeoffs are relevant, that other engineers will tap into a new kind of fluency, a more limitless map. In that sense, dMix is an invitation. For many great engineers, creating an audio experience is in the hands and the ear. In a way, dMix asks the question: what if it were in the mind?
