Big times for Digidesign. As you can see on Digidesigns website, the Venue console has just reached 500 sold units. It doesn’t sound much, but considering that these are high-end in a real gearslutty way, it’s a nice milestone. Congratulations Digidesign!
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Black Lion Audio has gotten their hands on one of the 003 units and have posted some tech specs about it on their website. They also report that they will begin to offer mods of it very soon.

blacklionaudio.com

McDSP states that all their plug-ins are fully working with the Digi 003 and that there is no need for an upgrade for this purpose.

One question, why would there be?

www.mcdsp.com

Digidesign has presented the new hardware exchange program for users who wants to move up to the 003 family.

It is avaliable here: www.digidesign.com/turbocharge

Beware non US citizens. When I first tried the link it didn’t work for me, it was because I was viewing the Swedish Digidesign website. You can change the location at the top right corner if it doesn’t work.

Some 002 users have been upset that they are not included in the upgrade list. This is probably because a) the 003 cost about as much as the 002 and b) the 002 family will still probably be supported for quite some time!

Digidesign have announced the release of Ignition Pack 2 and Ignition Pack 2 Pro. New to the Ignition Packs are among other things plug-ins from iZotope and Trillium Lane Labs. Check out the complete list at www.digidesign.com

The Ignition Pack 2 is bundled with the 003 Rack and all new Mbox 2 packages except the Mbox 2 Pro factory which instead includes the Ignition Pack 2 Pro bundle. The Pro bundle is also included with HD systems, 003, 003 Factory and 003 Rack Factory packages.

For more information: www.digidesign.com

Finally! The 003 family is here and like the 002 family it consists of one rack model and one desktop model. F rom just looking at the specifications one quickly sees there is not much new under the hoods, but without having the opportunity to actually try them and listen to them we can’t say much about the improvements of such things as the preamps so we will still have to wait a little longer until we really know what the new family have to offer.

David Gibbons, senior director, product marketing at Digidesign had this to say on the DUC.

“The I/O complement had to remain the same, so the differences in that area are relatively few. The biggest change is in audio quality. The mic pres were completely re-designed, and we upgraded their dynamic range by almost 6dB, and their distortion performance by almost an order of magnitude from 0.004% to 0.0007% (note the three zero’s after the period.)

We found several ways to enhance the 002 control surface as we re-worked it for 003: it now includes dedicated automation controls, and you can use the meters to provide an auto mode status display. The 2-line display provides much better visual feedback for all functions, allowing you to see 6-character channel names at the same time as parameter value readouts. With a jog/shuttle wheel and an external clock input, the product is more at home than before in post production environments. And the updated MIDI mapping mode will make controlling other MIDI apps and devices much more fluid for music producers.”

There you have it…

More details about the two units can be found at www.digidesign.com