Mixers/Consoles Need digital console advice

Here's a vote for the SD8. I realize it's at the top end of your budget, but it's a very nice desk, even with the black and gold color scheme. We had one come through and after spending a bit of time on it, I feel I can do just about anything I need to on it. I would have no trouble running musicals off of it. With the way I mix theatre, the 12 VCA's are perfect (I take up 3 right off the bat; VOX verb, Orch, Orch verb).

Hmmm, sounds tasty. Thanks, I was hoping to hear some feedback on this board. Did it come through with a road show, did you rent it in or just demo? Were you doing just SR or also recording?
 
Electronic scribble strips would definitely be helpful as configuration changes more often than I'd like, particularly with the large musicals. Is my recollection correct that the iLive is limited to five characters for the channel name?
Sort of, if I remember right you can give it a longer name but only the first five characters will display.
 
We had it for about a week long demo; ran FOH, did monitors, and rumor has it we're buying one (don't quote me on that). We never did any recording, though we used ProTools as playback a few times when we didn't have any musicians on hand. I found it very easy to use. The touch screen makes life pretty simple when coupled with the control strip directly to its right. There's also a feature called touch and turn where you can grab any knob and use the one encoder to control it if you're in a hurry. It wasn't working on our desk at the time (we were running V1.0.5 software), neither was the surround panner.

I think it sounds pretty decent. Just a quick back and forth on our system, I thought it sounded better than our PR40. Metering is very nice, and everything's color coded; aux's, matrix outs, control groups (which are your VCAs). One thing I have noticed is that the VCA assignments don't follow the automation (important for theatre). If they do, I haven't figured out how to recall assignments. And if it's important to you, the entire console can be operated from the center bay of 12 faders. Any bank can be assigned to it.

My understanding is it comes standard with MADI to connect to the racks (you can connect two stage racks, and you have 8 local ins and 8 local outs), though I recall you can get a fiber option to talk to the racks. The scribble strips show text as well. It's limited to around 10 characters I think. I can get most of what I need on one.

Patching effects is slightly unintuitive, you have to patch them in on the aux masters in the center section, rather than set up an effects rack elsewhere, even though there's an fx tab on the master screen. The internal effects sound pretty good, especially the SD verbs. Another fun toy is under the snapshot pane on the master screen. There's a touch to fire mode where you touch the scene you want, an it'll fire that scene. Handy for rehearsals.

I'll see if we have one when I get back up to Chicago and let you know more. Also check out the offline editors on all the boards you're looking at. I know Yamaha and DiGiCo have them up on their sites. I'm not sure about the other manufacturers you're looking at.
 
I'm going for a demo of the Digico SD8 Friday and working on a list of questions. I'll post more afterwards.
 
Yes, the Roland offers some really attractive features bundled with the snake. I believe list price with the snake is even less than the street price of the M7 48. I'd give it a serious look if they offered a decent control surface.

Were you satisfied with the quality of the built-in FX?

The Rolland 400 is around $9000, I just got one for my school's PAC. Essentially its a Yamaha LS9 with a digital snake. For the price, its hard to beat, being that it has the snake built in and comes with the Front of House break out boxes.

And yes i agree with everyone else, its not an M7, but it is pretty good.
 
The Rolland 400 is around $9000, I just got one for my school's PAC. Essentially its a Yamaha LS9 with a digital snake.
A competitor to the LS9, yes, but not the same and there are many differences between the two.

For the price, its hard to beat, being that it has the snake built in and comes with the Front of House break out boxes.
That all depends on the situation. The digital snake aspect can be a real benefit if you can take advantage of it but it can also be less desirable in some other situations, such as if you are looking for a direct analog console replacement and already have all the wiring in place to the console location. In that situation a digital snake may have no real benefit and be cumbersome to employ. Consoles should be assessed based on the specifics of the application and what may be a very good solution for one application may not be a good choice for other applications. That's actually a more general issue and many aspects of any system have to be considered relative to the application.
 
Anything midas.... especially the XL8... but all of their digital boards are fantastic!
 
Anything midas.... especially the XL8... but all of their digital boards are fantastic!

The XL8 is a nice board, but I think the Pro6 is a bit more... practical. They're both definitely out of the price range here. As for the Roland, I've heard from many people that it's not exactly suited to theatre use. The one time I got to play around on one, it just felt... cheap.
 
So here's a brief update. Just after the first of the year, I installed a Digico SD8. Having spent more time having fun in lighting land over the past couple of years, I have to say the SD8 has made doing sound fun again.

My only hands-on with digital boards had been on the Yamaha M7 at their day-long training session & the hour long digital mixing overviews at LDI. I think I'm over the hump on a steep learning curve with the SD8, but then every other new technology seems to be harder for me to pick up as I get older.

Pretty much everything I hoped to gain as a benefit from going to a digital console has turned out to be realized. I'll post some specifics a little later.
 

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