Our front-of-house console is a computer screen, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. The rig is a Waves eMotion LV1 Classic with an IONIC 24 feeding it, and after enough services and shows to trust it with the important Sundays, it’s earned a proper write-up.
The honest starting point: mixing on glass scared me, the same way it scares every engineer who grew up on faders. The fear is tactile — where do your hands go when everything is a touchscreen? The answer turned out to be: the same place your eyes were already going. You watch the mix anyway. Now the thing you’re looking at is also the thing you’re touching.
What the IONIC 24 changed: one box on stage handles the preamps and the processing brain, one cable run back to the mix position, and the whole “where does the server live, where does the I/O live” diagram collapses into something a volunteer can help pack down. Setup time is the quiet superpower here — the rig goes from cases to passing signal faster than our old analog snake ever did.
The actual reason to do this: the plugins ARE the console. Every channel gets the same Waves processing we’d reach for in the studio — real compressors and EQs we already know, not “console-brand approximations” of them. The mix that leaves the room on Sunday and the mix that comes out of the studio during the week are built from the same vocabulary. For a place that trains engineers, that consistency is worth more than faders.
What I’d tell you before you switch: your redundancy plan matters more than your plugin list — know exactly what happens when a computer hiccups before it happens during a bridge. Budget real time for gain-staging the system properly (SoundGrid land rewards discipline). And let your team touch it on a Tuesday before anyone touches it on a Sunday; the interface is fast once it’s familiar, and terrifying exactly once.
Mixing on a screen isn’t the compromise. Pretending a console from 2009 is the only legitimate way to mix — that’s the compromise.
Gear in this post
Waves eMotion LV1 Classic + IONIC 24 — available through Waves and pro audio dealers (links coming once we set them up).
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