Lawo has announced that its new sapphire compact mixing desk is now available for shipping. Equipped with VisTool 5.0 and either eight or 12 motorized faders, the sapphire is designed for interactive news and call-in shows.
The VisTool screen building software creates custom status display, tablet and touchscreen based button panels and mixing console controllers. The firm adds that the software also captures and manages snapshots and offers rights management functionality and offers GUI elements, including the ability to place Web page objects on custom panels, and integration to more devices through the Ember+ control protocol.
Other features for the mixing desk include autogain, which the company says, adaptively optimizes the dynamic range of all active microphone preamps with a single button, and automix, a DSP algorithm that rides the gain of any combination of mono and stereo input signals to produce “error-free mixes.”
The Sapphire is available in desktop and flush-mount styles. A 1-RU mixing engine includes a suite of signal processing functions, along with analog and digital I/O, plus AoIP and baseband connections.
