Jon Tatooles, Sound Devices’ co-founder & chief business development officer
that’s the system which is common-
ly known as Dugan today.”
But Dugan didn’t know exactly
what he had done. “It just kind of
fell out,” Dugan explains. “In order
to write the patent, I had to analyze
it and write the formula for it, which
turned out to be very simple. It’s
what a mathematician would call
elegant: The gain of each channel is
calculated to be the same as the ra-
tio of the level of that channel to the
level of the sum of all the channels.
I’d be proud if I had written that al-
gorithm, but I didn’t, actually. I had
to analyze that out of what worked.”
So I’m the inventor of gain sharing,
which is the generic term for the
Dugan Speech System.” A number
of what Dugan calls his “honorable
imitators” have manufactured prod-
ucts that accomplish similar tasks.
“They do a gain-sharing system
that’s not exactly the same way I
do it, but it’s the same general prin-
ciple. And they don’t use my name,
of course. My system has the pa-
rameters tweaked, and when you
license a Dugan system, you know
that you’re getting exactly the right
thing. So that’s how I’m still selling
an expired patent, because of the ex-
pertise in doing it the best way.”
Before Sound Devices brought
the Dugan Speech System to their
688 mixer/recorder, the 688 already
had a different automixing function
called MixAssist, which the 688 still
includes. Jon Tatooles of Sound De-
vices explains the details: “The re-
cent firmware update adds Dugan
along with MixAssist, so now the
customer can choose between the
two algorithms,” says Tatooles. “At
the end of the day, they both accom-
plish the same basic goal, which is
to improve the mix by activating
used microphones and turning off
unused microphones. But the way
they do this is different. The Dugan
system is very well respected and
well regarded for live-broadcast ap-
plications in particular, so that’s one
of its core strengths. We introduced
the MixAssist algorithm in our 788T
recorder, and it’s a great algorithm.
It may be better suited for tougher
applications where you need it to be
a little more aggressive. The Mix-
Assist algorithm attenuates micro-
phones in a different way than the
Dugan algorithm. Whereas Dan’s
algorithm is super smooth, MixAs-
sist may have more noticeable tran-
sitions. But in some cases that may
be the right tradeoff.”
Tatooles continues, “I think the
user is the best person to choose
which one is the most appropriate
for their application. They’ll get a
sense of it in different environments
by switching between the two al-
gorithms and finding which gives
them the sound they want. The nice
thing about having that tool within
the 688 is not only can you generate
that mix with MixAssist and Dugan,
and output that — let’s say you may
output that to camera — but you can
have all of your pre-fade ISOs on in-
dividual unprocessed tracks, so it
can be remixed later. You have lots
of flexibility.”
Dugan tells us that he did not
compromise his system’s perfor-
mance when integrating it into the
688. “It’s the full-bore Dugan Speech
System performance,” says Dugan.
“I’ve tested the basic function very
carefully, and it absolutely performs
the guaranteed Dugan automix-
ing function. It is stripped down in
terms of controls, compared with a
standalone Dugan. For example, it
doesn’t have separate on-automatic-
off, and it doesn’t have a separate
weight control for each channel.
But in most situations, most people
don’t use the controls very much.
I rent out automatic mixers every
week to people. They’ll often come
back and nobody’s touched the con-
trols. It works fine right out of the
box.”
On this topic, Tatooles says, “We
have made Dugan very simple for
the 688. We’ve consciously left out
some of the tools that are available
in the standalone Dugan products so
that it’s a simpler implementation.
We want people to be successful
with this right away.”
As automixing is relatively new
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