S3L-X Stagebox 16 compatibility with other Avid?

[Davoetta]

I think that would bring more troubles than benefit.
Just imagine u put the 2nd surface on stage for Monitors - they can screw your FOH Mix totally up.
An Personal Monitor Solution would be great - just look at A&H or Behringer - something like that - and more affordable than the Pivitec Solution.
More Faders could easily be done with an bigger Surface - what many hope that AVID will bring soon.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by Brent Lind

Why not put the stage box onstage and take the surface to FOH, then drive FOH from local outputs and use the stage box to drive monitors? If you do both FOH and MON you can get away with only running ethernet and basically bypassing the house snake system. If you want to use your desk and theirs, there's pretty much no way around a splitter.

Regarding X32's... When I was into 2-stroke engines, we had a saying: "fast, cheap, and reliable - pick 2" and think with an adjective substitution or two, its more than apropos when it comes to cheap digital mixers.

I guess you haven't worked with an X-32(old opinions die hard). In that case, I have another option that sits right in the middle and that's the Midas M32. A very nice piece of hardware and still a bargain next to the S3L.

[Brent Lind]

Originally Posted by albee1952

I guess you haven't worked with an X-32(old opinions die hard). In that case, I have another option that sits right in the middle and that's the Midas M32. A very nice piece of hardware and still a bargain next to the S3L.

I have worked with every desk under discussion and many more. The X32 and its a handy bit of kit for a low price point. However, it is not remotely in the same league sonically as any of the products this forum exists to support.

If you want to discuss the pros and cons of the X32 you can take it to gearslutz or a Music Group forum.

[albee1952]

Just offering suggestions. I just heard a show with 3 acts mixed on 3 consoles. Midas M32, Avid Profile and Paragon II. All 3 acts sounded great

[Kristo Kotkas]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Just offering suggestions. I just heard a show with 3 acts mixed on 3 consoles. Midas M32, Avid Profile and Paragon II. All 3 acts sounded great

Just discussed this same matter with a good friend of mine who is a die-hard Venue fan much like I am. Since he is a chief engineer of an audio company and I am a person who has couple of Venue desks of my own we tend to see quite a lot of shows where our desks are rented to the touring acts and band engineers work on them while we babysit them.

To be honest, 95% of times when I see people using our Venue consoles they don't use the full sonic potential of the desk at all... they only use basic channel dynamics, reverb or two and if they are really brave they might bring up a plugin comp or two, or three. They nearly always use only the plugins bundled with the desk and are very surprised about the sound improvement if introduced to a plugin... like a multiband comp or a TC Electronic reverb or something else, actually basic like that.

For me this seems like such a waste! For me, what makes the main difference with Venue and any other desks out there is the fact that if you know what you are doing, love to work harder and are looking to get the absolute best sound out of the situation, then nothing else provides you the tools besides Venue desks, period.

There are such a great bunch of people creating some amazing DSP, plugins, that make a HUGE difference in sound, when you use them CORRECTLY. The pre's-converters-mixbus of the desk is like 30% of "the sound" today, as most desks are pretty damn good in that department. But as I said, with Venue you are able to carefully choose the tools that give you complete control over your sound to tweak it as you wish and keep the SPL levels reasonable while giving you the sound that is Loud, Rich and Powerful with tasteful Reverbs and song-by-song snapshot automation that really works! For me, with Venue, I feel like I have a complete control over the sound. Using anything else, it feels like I'm flying blind... dynamics just happen with me really "steering" it, not controlling it. FX just being "ok" not being spot-on.

No low end console gives you that control over the sound... yeah, you can do "ok" with them.. but a guy behind a Venue that truly cares about the sound can do miracles.

And don't forget that this comes for a very reasonable price. Sure there are companies that have been inspired about the functions of Venue systems, but come on, no-one has the elegance of DAW integration like this, the "plugins" and internal FX provided by most desks are plain garbage. Or if you can integrate plugins of a certain Israeli company then it is expensive, includes carrying HW around and to make it truly reliable you must mirror the system with another set of HW. And still you will be tied to a set bunch of plugins from that manufacturer only.

So as I see it, people who just want it done, get over with it, can use pretty much any desk they can get their hands on, and if they are good at what they do, they can get it sounding pretty good. But Venue desks really shine in the hands of audio nerds, who care about the sound, a lot. Now, S3L has brought the ability to bring that top end sound quality that really actually depends on if the engineer is someone interested in using the tools available to him, down to all the small clubs and places where you simply cannot land a large footprint desk that is typically needed to provide this level of sound quality.

I only wish Avid would reveal all the DSP in S3L for us to use, since these 4 available DSP chips can get crowded real quick!

Don't you hate when people make parts of their text bold like that