The Digital Shift: Mixing Consoles - Text 1
Sound mixing changed in a fundamental manner between the 1930s and the 2000s. The very earliest mixing consoles enabled the mixing of only one voice track, one sound effects track and one music track on an optical medium (35 mm film). Most mixing systems in the 1930s were manufactured by the American firms RCA and Western Electric, which also produced equipment for telephones, discs and radio. Optical sound would be used in studios until the 1950s.
With the development of magnetic tape recorders such as the Nagra in the 1950s, it became much easier to record sounds anywhere out of doors. It was possible to connect small devices on the set to these portable tape recorders, such as the Girardin MT 36, manufactured in France,[1] which already mixed several tracks. These “mixettes,” as they are known in French, like the model produced in 1960 by Paudex in Lausanne for Nagra, are transportable mixing consoles connected to the tape recorder. At the time, there were only three inputs for the microphones, each one with controls for volume and for reducing low frequencies.[2] But these have nothing in common with much larger mixing consoles which appeared in auditoria.
