BillFitzmaurice.info

Has anyone gotten any experience with one of these? (16 XLR)

How does it compare with the Allen & Heath MixWizard WZ3 14:4:2 (10 XLR) or the Mackie 1642 VLZ-3 (10 XLR).

Headroom, sound quality, ease of us, and flexible monitor mixes are all key to us.

Best. Mixer. I've. Ever. Used.

I got this a few months ago. It was between this and an A&H GL 24ch board. I sat down with the PreSonus board at the shop and could intuitively figure out how to work it. Not the case with many other digital boards I've tried, such as the 01v. On the PreSonus, you can tell they took quite a bit of time to make it feel like an analog board.

The preamps are pristine. Lots of headroom. Preamps work great for recording, which is another main advantage of this board. I record my drums through it right into my computer, which is great. We can even record live shows, including a crowd mic, and get a great mix. I was a little nervous getting the first board a company has ever produced, but you can tell that the preamps were built for project studios in their recording interfaces.

Flexibility is the best part of this board. It's flexible with how you use it. I now use it as a recording/mixdown board in addition to a live board. It is the heart of band practice, recording every practice and every show. It's our monitor mixer. You can easily do 6 monitor mixes, and more if you sacrifice the two effects mixes.

Everything can be stored/recalled except for gain settings. This is sweet for shows with multiple bands, or for using the board for different purposes. It's also great to load in PEQs, compression, noise gate, etc for each channel as a preset. Routing is a snap, as you can assign any channel to any buss and/or the main buss. The large meter strips on the fat channel dynamically meter whatever you want, including gain, output, monitor mix levels, gain reduction, and other mixes. It makes on-the-fly adjustments much easier.

My only complaints are that there's only 16 mic pres and 4 subgroups, since now I want to get drums fully mic'd at every show for recording (I used to only do kick at indoor gigs) so now 16 inputs doesn't feel like enough.

Get the board.

BTW PreSonus is right in Baton Rouge, so stop by and see if you can check out the board. Judging by how friendly their crew is on their forum and phone/email conversations, they'll be happy to let you stop in and see what they've built.

Great... I also see on the site that you can combine two together.

For $2K you could build a sweet little RMLLabs' SAC system around a laptop and 16-24 channels of preamps. I have none of the limitations mentioned with the Studiolive, and for $300 I could add 16 channels of faders if I wanted. I'm not finding that I need to spend that money though. In my current 32 channel rackmount system I can run LCR FOH + subs and 12 stereo IEM's. That's limited only by the physical outputs I have connected. I still have 6 effects auxes per mix. Use any studio quality zero latency VST plugin you want for effects. Everything I use I found free online.
The system will scale to 72 channels with the right hardware so I never have to sell my current setup for half of what I paid in order to get something bigger, I just add more input interfaces. I spent just under $3K for my 32 channel rig and another $1600 would put me at 64 channels. The rackmount lives on stage with subsnakes placed around the stage, and I mix from FOH with a laptop over a wireless network. I do not string 32 channels of copper from the stage to FOH anymore (or pack them up). The developer has stated that as long as they're not simultaneous use, you can use one license in multiple locations. I have a laptop rig with up to 24 channels over firewire and a full rackmount system with 32 channels. On the rackmount system with RME interface I can record all 32 raw channels while also mixing them live. I think I could do the same on the laptop with an RME interface instead of my M-Audio. If you make money off live recordings it'd be worthwhile to pickup RMLLabs' SAW software which links directly with SAC and allows you to record at any of several direct out points in SAC.

Check it out. I found it well worth my mony instead of investing in the latest budget small-format digital console that'll be obsolete in a few years.

Oh, and I should also mention that all my preamps are studio grade preamps, because that's what they were intended for.

There's something about having one piece of equipment with knobs and meters and faders which you can touch. What if your laptop crashes?

mattaudio wrote:There's something about having one piece of equipment with knobs and meters and faders which you can touch. What if your laptop crashes?

What if the hard drive or CPU in the Presonus takes a dump?

If I were running a Laptop setup it would be far easier for me to run to walmart and buy a cheap laptop to cover my ass in the event of something horrible. At midnight there aint no open music stores and even if there were would they have another digital board?

In the real world I would probably be looking at carrying an analog back-up just in case!

Any one piece of gear could leave the show with bundles of dead air. Repatching and spares is largely a matter of what you're willing to carry to each gig.Since we use a 20ft. Mack Cab over Diesel to transport our rig we generally can replace just about anything with something else.The guy using a small trailer or van or wagon wont have that option so he would be taking greater chances.

Shows do occasionally go down but they are few and far between.

The laptop used to mix FOH for the rackmount is a 24 channel backup when plugged into the firewire interface that makes up 8 of my 32 rackmount channels. Drop the last 8 preamps, shuffle some optical cables, cable up the laptop and I'm back up. If the laptop dies on a laptop only gig, well, I could never afford a backup mixer before either. I'd like to eventually carry a spare mirrored system drive, those are fairly cheap and the most common point of failure. One thing that helps though is everything lives behind a server grade UPS providing stable 120V power to everything in the mix rack. That and a well ventilated case goes a long way toward keeping things happy.

Backups of sessions can be made to thumb drives. There's a user who has identical systems using MOTU external PCI gear at FOH and stage. Move the FOH system to the stage, move the MOTU host cables. Power up the mixer. If the FOH and stage kept each other's sessions in sync until one died then you're only as far back as the last save.

Given the sound quality and feature set, I'm willing to live with the disadvantages.

If you are running computerized sound gear, the same rules apply.
It is not *if*, but *when* the hard disk dies. If it moves, it dies. Guaranteed.
Replace at 3 year intervals. Ditto for fans and power supplies.

When I audit a client machine, I read the SMART counters to see how the disk is faring.
A number of drives with low hours are showing error counts. Dying time is nigh.
If your appliance uses a problematic disk such as the Seagate 7200.11, dying time is that much sooner.

There's no hard drive in the Studio Live btw

nola50
I am /was in the same market as you. Small format mixer with lot's of bells and whistles.
After a years worth of research and cost analysis I found SAC to be worth every penny and a few more. Digital mixers have a lot to offer yes, but big, expensive and still limited doesn't seem like a good deal. Analog desks can be just as pricey and you have to add another rack of outboard gear to accomplish the desired results. I guess what I am trying to say is make the choice of " I can live with/without that" and I see SAC as being able to have the cake and eat it too. It is fully expandable and can be made as redundant as your budget will allow. If you are worried about knobs and faders the software supports a host of external controllers IF you just can't let go of analog feel. BTW I have not got my SAC system together yet due to my BFD spending habits but it is in the plans to be up and running by next years end. My $.02

SAC would probably have more appeal to me, if as much standard COTS (commercial off the shelf) gear as possible is used.
The weak link is the proprietary controller cards and software.
The company goes belly up (like my Aardvark sound cards) and I'm left holding the bag.

bgavin wrote:SAC would probably have more appeal to me, if as much standard COTS (commercial off the shelf) gear as possible is used.
The weak link is the proprietary controller cards and software.
The company goes belly up (like my Aardvark sound cards) and I'm left holding the bag.

SAC systems are ALL off the shelf hardware components, Bruce. MOTU is hardly proprietary, and there are several reports of success with their hardware for SAC. RME cards are better, but if marketplace abundance is the primary concern, MOTU or M-Audio aren't going anywhere. As far as the software, even if Bob L. and RML Labs went under tomorrow, SAC is still going to work in its present (and very usable) form as long as there's hardware to run it on. It isn't tied into the audio drivers directly, only through MME or ASIO layers. There's enough brands of PCI and firewire interfaces that do ASIO that this is a non issue.

For the hardware investment to be sound, it should only have to be compared the expected life span of a comparably priced piece of traditional digital (or analog, for that matter) gear. So, for a 48 channel system, this is for SAC about $3000 or so (give or take), so compare to the Tascam DM-3200 at about $3000. Even then, its apples to oranges, as you have to add TDIF and ADAT interfaces to get all 48 working with 16 of them being aux returns only, and then add the fact that you get so much more capability with SAC, but we'll use it for the sake of comparison.

The average life of a mixer in great conditions is what, 8-10 years? I've been through two Mackies and a Behringer in 15 years at church, and that's a nice clean safe environment. I have a PC in my office that still runs quite well (if slowly, by comparison) despite the fact that it originally shipped with Win98. As long as you build your SAC PC from up-to-date parts from reputable manufacturers, you can expect it to last that 8-10 years. XP will still work then, as will whatever the latest version of the software is.

Add to that the fact that you get all kinds of enhanced capabilities, such as 24 separate monitor mixers, scalability, and allow for RML Labs to stay in business for more than 24 hours (quite likely) and I think you've got yourself a sound investment, which is why I've decided to put BFM cabs and SAC in my church.

If you're expecting so much more than that out of SAC, you have to ask yourself why. It's a professional tool. While there will be other and maybe better tools down the road that will eventually obsolete it, it is still undeniably the most bang for the buck in digital mixers. Even if you had to replace the computer in half the time of the interface, you have gained much more in performance than you have lost in cost. For that matter, you could buy multiple complete SAC hardware systems for less money than the equipment it easily replaces (mixer, EQ, dynamics processors, FX, speaker management, monitor mixers, digital snake, etc.).

bgavin wrote:SAC would probably have more appeal to me, if as much standard COTS (commercial off the shelf) gear as possible is used.
The weak link is the proprietary controller cards and software.
The company goes belly up (like my Aardvark sound cards) and I'm left holding the bag.

The hardware isn't proprietary. RME interfaces are recommended but only because RME makes very solid hardware and writes some of the best drivers. SAC works with any ASIO compliant hardware, and as of right now runs fine on XP, Vista and Windows 7. My rackmount is all "COTS" gear with the exception of the RME card. Gigabyte MB, Geil Memory, Intel CPU, Asus Monitor, WD Hard Drive, LG DVD. The 32 channel RME interface I use is available from a number of online suppliers and I picked mine up as a special order through Guitar Center. The Behringer ADA8000 preamps I purchased at Guitar Center.

I had the same concern myself. I finally came to the conclusion that if Yamaha goes belly up, my O1v still works. If RML Labs craters or Bob (the developer) gets hit by a bus, SAC is still incredibly usable and stable. It may not have the resale value of a traditional board, but it also doesn't come with the cost. Compare it to purchasing a 32 channel Yamaha M7CL for $17K, which is about the lowest I'd compare it to in feature set. I've spent $3k, including software, to put together my SAC rig. Over the lifetime of the rig, assuming I don't upgrade it to a 64 channel system, I may put another $4-500 into it to upgrade and maintain hardware. So while I may only get a few hundred in parts resale value, I'm still ahead about $13K. Start with the fact that a $17K M7CL is completely out of my budget range and wholly impractical for me to transport, and I'm so far ahead I could care less about what happens in the near future to SAC development.





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