Richard Ferriday and James Godbehear are in agreement – while their recent move from Midas to Cadac took the industry by surprise, it also presented them with something of a culture shock.

‘We’re now in a place where our contribution can make a difference to what goes on,’ Ferriday says. ‘It’s nice to be back in a position where you can make decisions and live or die by them.’

The move has seen the rearguard of Midas’ stalwart staff trade a large, corporate environment for ‘what feels very much like a start-up company’, and joining a recent round of recruitment in the Cadac R&D department. Talking to Fast-and-Wide at a recent workshop/demo co-hosted by loudspeaker specialist Outline in Italy, the new Brand Development Manager (Ferriday) and Brand Marketing Manager (Godbehear) seem a little bemused by their reception at Cadac…

‘I don’t quite know what we were expecting,’ Godbehear says. ‘It’s strange because we are not replacing anybody, we are joining a team of R&D engineers.’

‘Now the products are finished, the company can focus resources on marketing,’ Ferriday offers. ‘We arrived on our first day and they said, “So you’re the new marketing guys… do some marketing!” We’ve been left pretty much to our own devices – we haven’t had that kind of autonomy for quite a while, and it’s very refreshing and empowering.’

Ferriday describes Cadac as having been ‘living in a world of development’ for the past four years, but it is now preparing to become a new player in the high end of the digital mixing console market – following a history rooted in the recording scene of the late sixties and ‘owning’ the theatre sound market through much of the eighties and nineties. The company’s slow uptake of digital technology left the door open to competition, however, and DiGiCo’s adaptation of its live mixing technology to theatre use has seen it take the leading role in the theatre market.

But those R&D engineers have not been idle, and Cadac recently began shipping its CDC Four and CDC Eight digital desks. And, with new technology and new staff in place, the company is aiming to win back a place at the top table, as Ferriday is eager to explain: ‘We’re coming in, opening windows and throwing the curtains aside and saying, “Guys, there’s a great big world out there… customer expectations have ramped up considerably while you’ve been designing all this stuff and we need to be mobile enough to accommodate those expectations”.

‘The early results have been great,’ he adds. ‘The R&D people are very responsive and keen to get things done quickly. There isn’t any great bureaucracy in place – people just get their job done. That’s very refreshing for us.’

This is neatly illustrated by the development of Cadac’s Madi bridge. From being ‘a PCB sat on bubble wrap, hooked up to a variable power supply’, this received a software rewrite in 20 minutes and was turned into ‘effectively a finished product’ within a week. ‘To be able to go to someone and say “Can you do it?” and have them say “Probably”, and 20 minutes later there it is, is refreshing.'

Life after analogue

‘It’s probably significant that we have just finished building the last R-type console,’ Ferriday continues. ‘That will be the last ever large-format analogue Cadac console. We realise that the world has gone digital. There are opportunities for analogue consoles, but they tend to be fairly small format and I think our Live 1 series addresses all of the current market requirements for analogue consoles.’

The reinvention of Cadac follows its acquisition by the Chinese Soundking Group, which has made it a high-end stablemate of the British Studiomaster and Carlsbro brands, as well as to Soundking’s own MI lines. Any frustration Ferriday and Godbehear have felt in the past does not look likely to be repeated, however, as Cadac continues to operate autonomously. And it is ready to make its play for a part in the digital console market.

‘Cadac has a great history of making fantastic recording consoles,’ Ferriday says. ‘But the time that a console made for recording can't be used for anything else has gone, because the technology of today can be adapted to just about any application. It’s the platform approach – you design a viable platform and wrap it up through the user interface to offer as a theatre product, or a broadcast product or a concert touring product. The stuff under the hood is pretty much the same, its just identifying what the user interface needs to do and what users’ expectations are, and then putting that box around it.

‘Live sound has changed console wise… Going back into the past, a couple of brands have tended to dominate the market alongside a few other bit-players. People have taken turns doing this – Soundcraft had a turn at the top of the market, Midas and Yamaha dominated the market for quite a long time. But it isn’t like that any more. Anybody who wants a piece of hardware to join 40 microphones to two speakers now has an enormous choice. There are products from Allen & Heath, from Mackie, from DiGiCo, from Behringer, from Soundcraft, from Midas… there is a much wider choice of consoles and most of them are viable pro products. You have to be a lot more nimble now.

‘You need to identify the customer and tailor the product toward them. Cadac cannot continue to only focus on the theatre market because it’s too small a niche for a manufacturer to survive in – which is what led the company into the difficulties it had a few years ago. Products have to be much more diverse and more flexible; they have to be attractive not only to theatre but also to concert touring, fixed install, houses of worship, broadcast and recording.’

Presenting the CDC Four and CDC Eight to an invited audience of international PA companies and engineers as part of a special event organised with loudspeaker systems company Outline in Italy, Ferriday invited the feedback he feels is now required to turn powerful technology into winning products. He identifies audio quality as Cadac’s overriding consideration, with users able to lead feature development.

And he is quite candid about the available technologies and how they are implemented: ‘Audio quality is something that Cadac has always focused on, and one of the reasons that the consoles continue to sound as good as they do,’ he confirms. ‘There’s a lot more to a good digital console than making a good mic pre.

‘Much of our digital circuitry, I would imagine, is pretty much the same as everybody else’s because we all use the same Sharc processors and FPGAs,’ he continues. ‘But one of the things that Cadac does that most other manufacturers don’t pay enough attention to is differential latency through digital systems. Cadac digital consoles are designed so that the latency is managed to keep the audio phase-coherent at the outputs. There are very few console manufacturers who bother using DSP horsepower for that kind of thing – they use it to provide more feature-based stuff rather than assigning DSP resources to keeping the audio alive.’

Some of Cadac’s DSP has, however, been invested in modelling the EQ from the company’s large-scale analogue J-type console. Which is not to say that the CDC Four/CDC Eight mic preamps have been neglected: ‘The mic preamps are newly tweaked and they sound wonderful,’ Ferriday assures.

‘If you measure the distortion and noise of any of the classic mic preamps from yesteryear, technically they are not as good as you find on a so-so console these days,’ he says. ‘So it’s not the technical performance that defines the mic pre, it’s the characteristic of it – it’s what it contributes or doesn’t contribute to the audio. It’s about transparency or colouration artifacts. People have preferences – you can’t usually say that a mic pre is bad; all you can say is that you prefer one mic pre to another. Audio is subjective, and that’s one of the reasons that the industry is so much fun… the arguments never get settled.

‘Cadac mic preamps are designed to be extremely transparent,’ he elaborates. ‘Again, this goes back to the recording studio origins of the company and the development of the products through musical theatre, where the audience ideally is unaware that the sound is being amplified. Absolute transparency of the signal chain is what has driven Cadac designs.

‘If you look at a classical gig with a large orchestra to amplify or record, the first thing you’re going to need is an awful lot of channels – which we can do. The CDC Eight, at the moment, will do 128 channels simultaneously. The fact that it is such a clean-sounding console with so many inputs makes it an obvious fit for that kind of event.’

The integration game

In addition, Cadac is talking with Waves about integrating its plug-in processing into Cadac consoles: ‘It has only just started and there is a lot of work to do, but we do have a commitment in place to bring our technologies together,’ Ferriday says. ‘At present, the CDC Eight has prototype software with Cadac-written effects – we’ve got reverb, delay and modulation effects. There’s enough stuff there to keep most people happy with the console’s own performance, but there are always going to be some esoteric effects that somebody wants to use.

‘As a console manufacturer, you can’t always aspire to fulfil everybody’s requirements because sometimes that’s a very specialised job. And that is exactly the kind of thing that Waves is very good at. We will offer consoles with a suite of stuff that is adequate for most applications and Waves will provide all the specialised processing.

‘I’m not aware of how readily compatible the two technologies are, or how long a job integrating them will be – some of it’s software, some of it’s hardware. We appreciate how important this is because we know that people expect a console to be able to do everything these days, and we have to cover all options.’

Another active area of development will open up the networking possibilities of the consoles: ‘Cadac has its own protocol for moving digital audio around which is very good – it will cope with 256 channels of 96kHz audio, so it’s a very high data rate system,’ Ferriday explains. ‘But because it’s a proprietary system, it can’t talk to the outside world, so that is why we have the new Madi converter and are working with Audinate on a bridge to Dante. There will also be other protocols as well. As I’ve been saying, Cadac can’t live in a sealed box and we now need to connect with the rest of the world.’

With so much going on, it’s tempting to anticipate the rejuvenated Cadac going head-to-head with DiGiCo, but Ferriday is more cautious: ‘DiGiCo has done an amazing job of going from absolutely nothing to holding a very substantial position in the market in ten years, which is a hell of an achievement,’ he says.

But a few moments’ conversation with the new Cadac men leave no doubt that they are relishing the challenge of re-establishing Cadac in the high-end mainstream: ‘We’re now shipping,’ Ferriday repeats. ‘It has taken a long time to develop but we now have a working platform, so the development time and the time to market for any future products will be shortened considerably. We should see new console products in the near future.’

While some of these remain a secret for now, they will include a sidecar for the CDC Eight and an iPad app that will provide both remote control and second-screen operation for the CDC Four.

‘We have quite long sleeves,’ Godbehear says with a knowing smile. ‘Watch this space, because it could all happen very quickly…’

See also:
Outline and Cadac: The Brescia Connection (Cadac joint workshop/demo with Outline) 
Midas/Klark Teknik:The Next Chapter 

More: www.cadac-sound.com