mixer with cues?

[Gofer]

My high school runs a yamaha m7cl and we have around 26 inputs (16 lavs, 6 overheads, 4 boundaries) and the automation certainly makes life a lot easier. The problem with renting a board like that, which i believe was stated before, is that learning how to use it in a short amount of time is hard. In my opinion anything you can do to reduce the amount of mic changes and switching on and off by the actors will be useful since actors (at least at the high school level) are stupid and when they have to do anything to the mics they tend to screw them up. While the yamaha's are great if your working on a budget they can be quite expensive, I'd reccomend checking out the tascam dm4800 which, at $7,000, is significantly cheaper than the m7cl ($25,000) even though the tascam isn't nessecarily a "live board" it should have most of the features your looking for including midi functionality.

 

[Parker]

With 24 channels, and keeping the price affordable, you are looking at renting an O1V/96 and a couple of preamps, an LS9-16 with preamps, an LS9-32, or a Roland 400.

We just did The Man Who Came to Dinner. We ran only 14 mics IIRC, and had about 130 cues. We run fader cues instead of mute cues. If the operator gets off cue and has to go manual, it's a lot more natural to grab faders than to start punching mutes.

We run everything but the faders recall safe, so that if we need to change an EQ or gain (mic shifts position, voice gets weak), we don't have to save the change to every cue.

Agreed about the fader cues...
We run an LS9-32 at my theatre and it works very well for "cueing" the next group(s) of mics "on the fly" it is very easy to mark the script (similar to lighting cues) and then press one of the user-defined-keys (essentially shortcuts) to advance forward to the next cue (bringing the next group up to a nominal level). Nice little trick to have in your back pocket.