Looking to replace a decade-old Audient ASP8024 mixing console for something new, the team at Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC) made it easy for themselves by choosing an ASP8024 Heritage Edition.

For Coordinator and Professor of Audio Engineering, Dr Ian Corbett, it was a simple decision: ‘Teaching signal flow on the ASP8024 has always been easy, so why change a good thing? We had used the classic for 12 years and it survived hard student use and a building move so well. Less than one minor repair every five years – that’s a great track record compared to some other products we’ve had.’

Reliability and ease of installation were important considerations: ‘The wiring and infrastructure from the classic ASP8024 was, of course, already there for the new mixer, so installation could not have been easier. A bunch of students to lift the old board out, and the new one in, and within an afternoon the room was back in operation.’

Corbett has planned by choosing the Dual Layer Control (DLC) option on the new desk. ‘This way we can also introduce the hybrid studio and prepare students for the other two studios they will use during their time at KCKCC,’ he explains.

The college Audio Engineering deptartment comprises three recording studios and a multi-station classroom/lab, as well as comprehensive live sound systems. The new desk is based in a predominantly hardware and hands-on room, used by students in their second semester audio engineering class. Each studio is dedicated to a particular class so students have plenty of studio time to complete assignments, so about 10-15 students use the new mixer each semester.

Corbett champions working outside the box: ‘The DAW is just functioning as a multitrack machine, not a mixer – encouraging students to get it right as they track it. This hardware mixing experience is essential preparation for entering jobs in the live sound, event production or broadcasting industries, where there is no Command-Z, and DAWs are not the centrepiece of the production environment.’

The college sees increasing numbers of students with their own home studio – DAW and plug-in based – who initially question the need for such a strong hardware focus. ‘After explaining that the entry-level jobs we typically train for require confidence in real-time hands-on operation and commitment to decision making and not DAW skills; and that the signal flow and troubleshooting skills they learn will better prepare them for almost anything, they get it and understand our reasoning.’

The arrival of the new console coincided with acoustical upgrades to the studios, which had taken a few years to come to fruition. After a move into new rooms giving them four times the space they had in the old building, all rooms have now been renovated to professional standards.

‘The improvement is huge,’ Corbett reports. ‘The sonic improvements obviously, but having different colours in each room gives the facility a vibe it didn’t have previously. It’s truly a pleasure to show to prospective students, and see the excitement the more professional looking, and sounding, environment creates for students using it.’

As before, the curriculum focuses on music. ‘Not because that’s where the jobs are, but because it’s a great skill set and preparation for a wide variety of fields,’ Corbett argues. ‘In recent years we’ve added more non-music based components to introduce students to a wider variety of career paths, including game audio, audio for video, Dante and audio networking for example’ says Ian. ‘We’ve also expanded the live sound reinforcement components, and we are now teaching Dolby Atmos mixing after upgrading our 5.1 room to 7.1.4 a couple of years ago.

‘The past two years have been stressful for everybody, but particularly training for the audio industry,’ he adds. ‘It’s good to know that jobs are out there again, but they’re not all in the places they used to be, so we have to open students’ eyes to where the opportunities are.

‘We are a two-year programme preparing students for the widest variety of opportunities we can, rather than graduating “experts” in a very focused field. We will continue to add new technologies and techniques as necessary. The past two years have shown how much more marketable a graduate who also has some video skills is. Installation and networking are probably the areas we will try to expand on next.’

More: www.audient.com