User's Manual

5
XL8 Control Centre
Quick Reference Guide
Chapter 3: About The XL8 Control
Centre
This chapter introduces you to the XL8 Control Centre and provides a brief hardware
description.
Overview of the XL8 Control Centre
The XL8 Control Centre comprises a combined control surface and graphical user
interface (GUI) that provide an array of easy-to-use controls for the precise
manipulation of audio.
The control surface has been designed to emulate the fast access of an analogue control
surface by presenting things in a familiar, consistent and logical way so that
experienced analogue engineers can migrate easily to the new digital surface. This is
enhanced by visual representations on the GUI at the top of control surface, which also
provides extra functionality.
The XL8 Control Centre is built on a robust Midas steel frame chassis similar to those
used for established Midas analogue products. The frame houses five bays, each of
which is a discrete hardware module that can operate independently of its neighbour.
Collectively, the bays provide the primary mixing needs of the engineer.
Each bay has its own power supply, control surface modules, control surface
processors, GUI processor and GUI screen. The control surface and GUI processors for
each bay are separately connected to the network on duplicated Ethernet links. Also
housed within each bay are dual redundant master controller processors and dual
redundant high-speed network routers (eight AES50 connections each).
Multiple hardware faults are tolerated by the XL8 Control Centre without loss of audio
control due to the dual redundancy and N+1 methods incorporated in the system. This
is further helped by the modular nature of the bays and GUI independence. So, if a
whole bay fails others can take over or be used instead, and any of the GUI screens can
be used to operate the whole XL8 Control Centre, even if none of the control surface
hardware is working.