Venue SC48 and Pro Tools LE

[Justin Bartlett]

Hello everyone. I'm a newbie here, and I don't have any Venue products (though we do have an LE rig), but I'm hoping that may change in the future. I've been hoping the SC48 might be the entry point for my church into the Venue line.

The biggest sticking point for us is the 18-channel limit for the Pro Tools LE connection.

Here's our situation. We're doing a renovation this summer on our smaller sanctuary, a 400-seat space. We've run out of room for the contemporary services in our larger room, so we're adding concurrent contemporary services in the 400-seat room, complete with separate band and message.

We've had "blended" services in this room, but doing full contemporary services requires a significant upgrade, as it will involve micing a full drum kit and the processing that involves, etc.

We will definitely be purchasing a new mixer in this room.

At minimum, we'll purchase an analog mixer with channel direct outs to send to an Aviom monitoring system, but I'd like to make the jump to digital. Something in the $20k range is probably at the high end of our realistic budget for now, so I've been looking at the M7CL and the iLive T as primary possibilities, but I've also been waiting to see details about the SC48 ever since the rumors started.

The primary draw of the Digidesign line for me is the Pro Tools integration, allowing multitrack recording, and most importantly, the virtual soundcheck feature. We have a lot of dedicated volunteers on our audio team, and the ability to train them and have them practice mixing without needing to arrange for a band to play would just be priceless.

The problem is, with 8 to 10 channels just for the drum kit, a limit of 18 channels to and from Pro Tools places a severe limit on the usefulness of this feature for training and engineer practice purposes. It's not completely useless, but it turns a game-changing feature into a rather more marginal benefit over the other choices, and makes it much harder for me to sell the mixer to the rest of the team making purchasing decisions. I end up looking a bit harder at other solutions, including the MADI card available for the M7CL to use with 3rd party recording software.

Our budget at this point, for this room, will not allow us to look at a Profile system with the HD64 option, as much as I would like to have it (and such a system may be in our future a few years down the road).

I don't know where we'll end up, but an increased channel count on the Pro Tools LE interface - ideally to 30 or 32, but even to 24 - would be a true game changer in our decision, and would very likely result in us purchasing an SC48 this summer.

I know Sheldon has commented that this would be "cool" but that engineering priorities have gone elsewhere, and that's understandable, but is there any chance of that changing soon? The SC48 seems like a great console, and given the fact that the LE interface is included in the console, it seems like such an upgrade could have a significant impact on your sales. I can't imagine I'm the only person for whom it's a real factor.

Anyway thanks for all your great work; I'd appreciate any response you can give.