GearUp
A Perfect Mix: Sound Devices
Sound legend Dan Dugan & Sound Devices’ Jon Tatooles
discuss automixing technology.
by Jesse Dobbs
The name ‘Dugan’ has long been known as the authority in automatic mixing, a technology
that intelligently turns microphones on and off.
Dan Dugan, the man behind the famous Dugan
Speech System, recently partnered with the audio experts at Sound Devices to implement his
automixing technology into the Sound Devices
688 mixer/recorder. This is the first time a field
production mixer has included the Dugan system,
and that’s a pretty big deal. Even though automixing has been around for nearly half a century,
many location mixers are unfamiliar with it. So
we talked with Dugan and Jon Tatooles, Sound
Devices’ co-founder and chief business development officer, to find out more about this collaboration and what it means for the pros in the field.
Dugan explained to us the basic need that
automixing fulfills. In any situation where you
have multiple microphones and several people
speaking within the same environment, you’ll
run into some inherent challenges. “The main
problem is that you have more microphones
picking up the noise in the room,” says Dugan.
“The more mics you have, the noisier the sound
becomes. Even with only two microphones,
you’ll require active mixing, which is when the
mic on whoever is not talking needs to be turned
down and the mic on whoever is talking needs
to be turned up. And when someone else is talk-
ing, their mic needs to be turned up and the other
mics need to be turned down.”
The more mics there are, the more important
this active mixing becomes — and the tougher the
job becomes. Dugan notes, “A lively discussion
& Dan Dugan
