So when this thread blew up, I decided to
throw myself on the bomb and see what this
console really had to offer. It just happens that as the same time my
venue is in need of a new
monitor console. Being a state building, getting new things takes time so I thought it would be a great time to give the X32 a run. I contacted Joe and he was more then happy to
send me a
console to demo for November. The northeast rep, John Dinicola, brought the
console up and did training on it for one of my engineers and myself. Even though John's apartment was in Hoboken... and two days before had 4' of water infront of it... and he had to wait two hours for gas, he successfully made it up.
We did about an hour and a half of training before we started patching up the act for the night. The show was a woodstock era tribute band with 30 inputs and 8 mixes. The group was a
house band with different frontmen for each of the "bands". I ran the
console for the first night. Our
house wedges are active Meyer UM-1P with no processing.
So, first impressions is this thing reminds me a lot of the AVID consoles. There are no menus/setting buttons to hit to get to anything. Need more compression, grab the dynamics
encoder, need to tighten that
gate... grab the
gate encoder...
etc. During the show there was no reason to touch any of the things on the
screen. Everything is right there on the front panel ready to go. If you do need to dig into the details on any of the sections, a quick "view"
button on each section drops you right into the
screen for that section of the
console. Setup and patching was rather simple. That
block of 8 thing is a little weird, but in my world where we are used to and wired for analog anyway that is really not a big deal. The display screens on each
channel are extremely easy to read. Even better, you can customize the color for each
screen. That was something that really came in handy when flipping layers.
As far as actual show operation goes this thing sings as a
monitor console. Besides have a 4 band parametric on every input and an 6 band on every mix, you can
throw a 31 band graph on each mix as well. To set the graphs, you can use the DCA/Mix faders which is pretty cool and fast. You can have the master
fader that usually controls L/R control your
cue wedge which is beneficial. The speed of this
console shows though when you put it in "sends on
fader". It is very easy to
throw into this mode with a big
button in between the master and
channel section. The
button glows bright red when active, though I wished it flashed as well. When in this mode it works just like on
Yamaha consoles, you press a select on a mix and then all
channel faders move to what is on that mix. The
channel screens put a notation on every
screen saying which mix is active. There is a flipside to this as well, which I did not think I would use that much but became the killer feature of this
console. When you select a
channel and sends on
fader is active the master section gives you control of each mix for that individual
channel. So, when I was dialing in mixes during
sound check it was easy to select a single mic and set that input for each musician onstage. During the show if a musician was having an issue I could select there mix and easily dial in what they needed. Working both ways was extremely fast. I know other consoles have this feature, but for a
console this size it is killer. I never once reached for the dedicated mix controls. I'm sure it I was mixing
FOH I would, but for monitors they are not really needed. This alone made my night one of the easiest I have ever had behind a
monitor console. I was pretty active most the night with the changing frontmen and I never got lost.
Now, as far as sound goes I can find no faults in this
console. The headamps sound great and have plenty of
headroom. The
console sounds rather warm and clean. It is not as warm as our Heritage but is **** close.
The next night we had NY Banjo featuring Bela Fleck and about a half dozen other banjo players in (including the guy who played Dualing Banjos on Deliverance). My engineer that had less the a hour on the
console before the day started was easily able to get the show up and going. Bela's engineer, who has been with him for 25 years, had no complaints about the sound when we were dialing in the mixes before the band arrived. That show also went off without issue.
So, yes, this
console does have some limitations. The
block of 8 thing can bite you. The effects inserts are a
bit weird, not all 8 blocks can be used the same. But, for a street price under 3 grand you get a killer
console that is well built, feels good on your hands, and has a ton of
power. I'm still going to be getting an SC48 for our
monitor desk strictly due to the 32 input restriction of this
console, but I will have no issues running shows on this
console before that
console shows up. It will also give us some more flexibility in our smaller space which is very much needed. There is nothing that touches this
console for under 10k as far as I am concerned. No, its not a
Profile or an SD7, but it blows anything double or triple its price out of the water. This thing really is a game changer.
I have the
console for a few more weeks and will put it in an
FOH situation and record with it. I'll let you guys know how that works out.
Woodstock show:
NY Banjo: