light weight SC48 case?

[xcx]

Hi !

Can anyone recommend a most possible light weight SC48 Case? Or a light construction? No need for rack units, drawers (i would put the keyboard in the dog house), big dog house... (its a remote system, so not much going on in the dog house anyway...)

Thing is, I am thinking about a Second Case, that is more light, and only used for smaller Shows, Van-Touring etc.. not Truck or trailer delivery.

Any suggestions?

[Kristo Kotkas]

Originally Posted by xcx

Hi !

Can anyone recommend a most possible light weight SC48 Case? Or a light construction? No need for rack units, drawers (i would put the keyboard in the dog house), big dog house... (its a remote system, so not much going on in the dog house anyway...)

Thing is, I am thinking about a Second Case, that is more light, and only used for smaller Shows, Van-Touring etc.. not Truck or trailer delivery.

Any suggestions?

I did my first SC48 case thinking like that. And I hated myself for not doing a proper keyboard drawer afterwards... so I sold the case and ordered a decent case. Sc48 is really not your baby desk, it requires and deserves a proper case. S3L in the other hand is something to play around with, I'm planning to get a second system and I'm thinking about ordering a complete set of soft cases for it, something like a surface in one bag with MBook Air in there too, the engine and the screen in another bag and couple of stage boxes in the back bag. Will see if I find a local guy to make me these bags... this would be then my mega-portable system.

[xcx]

i totally get your point here, but: i already have a very proper heavy duty case (3pieces, doghouse, holds two monitors, external psu, keyboard drawer...150kg... does not fit into any regular car at all).

This would be just an additional case to make the desk fit in my car and not having to have a van all the time. the case would not be used for regular touring, rather for a small festival season this year and one/off shows here and there. as i just travel with the desk, stagebox, cat6 and mics, having a second smaller case to fit my car might comes in handy this year.

on the other hand, i really don't like the s3l surface. with another surface the s3l system as it is might be interesting for me, but at this point: no.

as long as there is no other "new" surface then the s3 i will continue with the sc48. I love it, its just a bit heavy thats all.

[TheMAXX]

Originally Posted by xcx

i totally get your point here, but: i already have a very proper heavy duty case (3pieces, doghouse, holds two monitors, external psu, keyboard drawer...150kg... does not fit into any regular car at all).

This would be just an additional case to make the desk fit in my car and not having to have a van all the time. the case would not be used for regular touring, rather for a small festival season this year and one/off shows here and there. as i just travel with the desk, stagebox, cat6 and mics, having a second smaller case to fit my car might comes in handy this year.

on the other hand, i really don't like the s3l surface. with another surface the s3l system as it is might be interesting for me, but at this point: no.

as long as there is no other "new" surface then the s3 i will continue with the sc48. I love it, its just a bit heavy thats all.

I totally agree with you about the lighter case for the uses you specified. But you must have a very big car to be able to fit an SC48 even in a case that is of minimum size. Can you lift the SC48 without a case? It looks like a normal SC48 is 125 pounds. Is it much lighter since some of the cards are now in the stage box? Even with a lighter case it is still going to be heavy. But I think you are right to get the lighter case.

I have been looking for a lightweight case for a different mixer. I have found that some case companies are using a plastic material in place of the plywood that is usually used and with that there can be a weight savings of about 30 percent or more. So for example a case that might usually weigh 100 pounds would only weigh 70 pounds. That can make enough of a difference, sometimes. In the USA I have seen Anvil and Calzone, which are actually owned by the same people make cases using the lightweight plastic panels. Also Wilson case company makes a lighter weight case as an option but I really don’t like their latches. I think it is more costly to get the lighter version from any of them.

Good luck and please let us know what you end up doing.

[Kristo Kotkas]

Sure you can end up with a smaller case, for example, I can fit my Profile with Stage & FOH racks and a club-lenght snake into the back of Chrysler Grand Voyager so that still 4 people fits in the same car! Sc48 is even smaller. Bad thing is you still need someone to help you with lifting these things.

What comes to S3L surface, sure, it stinks in couple of ways.. select buttons - were these ever tested on humans? meters - how hard it would have been to move them closer to the fader they ACTUALLY show metering for? But you get used to most other stuff... The amount of Function keys is grand, can't beat that! Each touch strip zone multiplies the amount of F-keys, so in my case I have everything up there, panning for guitar solos, pro tools transport, arming of tracks in PT, view changes, 31 to faders, tap tempo etc etc, very nice. but the main thing with S3L is the expandability, when software goes 32 or more auxes it's just one more page on the surface, that is not going to be possible on Sc48.

Can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish Avid would stop the sales of 1gen Venue's and would focus on the 2g HW/SW. Time to move on, to bump the SR to 96khz and have new software. At least 32 auxes mon or stereo, without the loss of stereo groups. I would like to see 16 stereo groups with ability to send groups to auxes and other groups. Using plugins routing trick and free channels to send Groups to Aux right now is a real PITA. I wish the internal to USB recording and playback would be upped to 4 channels so, that L/R plus also a pair of ambience mics could be directly recorded to the USB drive. 4 tracks of playback would also allow to play back backing tracks with Stereo track and a Click track plus another mono track from a USB. That would be special! Ok, enough of this