New Consoles Help

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losthighway
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New Consoles Help

Post by losthighway » Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:04 pm

Alright, I can't believe I'm asking this question, but here we are.

I use my board, all the time. Never for the pres, seldom for the eq, and constantly to direct traffic; getting headphone mixes setup through the Aux sends, during tracking, sending signal to various outboard gear during mixing.

My old Soundcraft Delta's power supply has gone out for the second time in two years. The monitor out has been shorting for a long time, so I've had the main outs going to my monitors, but the master section's two faders have uneven gain unless they're all the way up. It's all fixable, but maybe not worth it anymore.

I'm tempted by the idea of something new and clean and reliable. I don't care at all about the pres, I mainly need something that won't negatively impact the sonic quality of anything that passes through the TRS ins during the mix process, and won't skew the impression of what's going on through the monitor section. I have a bunch of great pre's and I don't have cash for a little Trident, or API. I also don't need cheesy on board digital fx, or USB connection or any of that business.

Here's what I'm looking at so far:

Soundcraft GB2R 16
Soundcraft LX7ii
Alan and Heath GL (most expensive of the stuff I'm looking at)
Yamaha MGP24 (digital fx seem unavoidable with their mid-sized boards)

I haven't even considered messing with a new Mackie, or Tascam board, but is that based on an unfair bias? Should I?

I'm really curious as to what the real differences are between the two lines of Soundcraft. The LX7ii has the master section right in the middle which feels really different to me. The GB looks cheesier.

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Nick Sevilla
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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by Nick Sevilla » Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:23 pm

I swear by my Allen & Heath GL8232. 32 channels.

Owned it since 2008, still amazing.

It has off the shelf parts you can still find online easily, the channels are all modular, so you can buy a few spare channels, and swap them out
if you need to do repairs on one. It has facilities for two power supplies in tandem, and to connect more consoles to the main one's 8 buss architecture.

You can find them super cheap everywhere. Oh, btw, you can configure banks of 8 channels and the Master section however you want. I have mine in the center, because I was doing a lot of 16 track recording, so one side was inputs, the other monitoring.

The mic preamps are amazingly good. Have used them with some U47 mics all the way down to Shure SM57s. They always have a decent clean sound.

If you get it, PM me for the full manual, including the service manual ;).
Howling at the neighbors. Hoping they have more mic cables.

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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by Scodiddly » Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:43 pm

There's very little that actually sounds bad these days. Mostly it's a question of some kind of contrived "warmth" (something like a Behringer-built Midas, perhaps) vs. "boring" which would be Allen & Heath. And in general the electronics side of things tends to be very reliable, too.

What's your taste for doing minor repairs? The A&H GL consoles are available all over the place used, usually with very little wear and the only thing needed would be reseating (and some DeOxit) on the ribbon connectors inside. If it's still the same basic design as in the past 20 years then it'll be easy to work on.

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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by losthighway » Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:56 pm

Scodiddly wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:43 pm
There's very little that actually sounds bad these days. Mostly it's a question of some kind of contrived "warmth" (something like a Behringer-built Midas, perhaps) vs. "boring" which would be Allen & Heath. And in general the electronics side of things tends to be very reliable, too.

What's your taste for doing minor repairs? The A&H GL consoles are available all over the place used, usually with very little wear and the only thing needed would be reseating (and some DeOxit) on the ribbon connectors inside. If it's still the same basic design as in the past 20 years then it'll be easy to work on.
Well, I have a soldering iron and I've made cables/wired my patchbays, but I've always been scared to dive all the way in. Maybe this would be an excuse to do it.

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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by losthighway » Fri Nov 27, 2020 4:37 pm

Scodiddly wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:43 pm
What's your taste for doing minor repairs? The A&H GL consoles are available all over the place used, usually with very little wear and the only thing needed would be reseating (and some DeOxit) on the ribbon connectors inside. If it's still the same basic design as in the past 20 years then it'll be easy to work on.
Yeah, there's all kinds of A&H GLs on Evil bay right now. Not so much on Reverb. Some of them even have free shipping. I'm tempted!

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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by Scodiddly » Fri Nov 27, 2020 5:55 pm

losthighway wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:56 pm
Scodiddly wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:43 pm
What's your taste for doing minor repairs? The A&H GL consoles are available all over the place used, usually with very little wear and the only thing needed would be reseating (and some DeOxit) on the ribbon connectors inside. If it's still the same basic design as in the past 20 years then it'll be easy to work on.
Well, I have a soldering iron and I've made cables/wired my patchbays, but I've always been scared to dive all the way in. Maybe this would be an excuse to do it.
The most common thing I've had to do on those GL consoles is flip it upside down, take off the bottom panel, and just clean & reseat the ribbon connectors. Often no soldering at all, unless you want to remove a channel strip for some reason. Then you'd have to unsolder the big ground bus wire that runs parallel to the ribbon cables. Boring but reliable, maybe you'd want to clean the pots. Try to find one that's less than 10 years old, though, the capacitors will be in better shape.

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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by losthighway » Sat Dec 05, 2020 4:54 pm

This thing came. I unboxed it and got everything set up pretty quick. Everything looked and felt really clean, just a little feel of grit on the master fader and some live sound dude stuck a label maker sticker for his 'verb' and 'delay' next to a couple of the aux knobs. No biggy (especially for $500). I started mixing immediately.

Initial thoughts: 6 auxes are certainly better than 4. The pink noise or oscillator selector button is nice for calibration type stuff. I can't wrap my head around the matrices yet.The EQ doesn't seem particularly great, but I wasn't looking for that, probably just high/low passing the occasional reverb send.

The only thing I don't love so far is the power section, (maybe a fan?) has a high pitched whine. It's drowned out by music played at a fairly low level, so not a deal breaker.

All in all, a slam dunk, especially for what I paid.

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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by Scodiddly » Sat Dec 05, 2020 5:14 pm

There's a little fan in the internal power supply. I had one customer who kept burning them out somehow.

If you've got the PSU jack you can get the rackmount PSU which I think has no fans.

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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by losthighway » Sat Dec 05, 2020 5:46 pm

Scodiddly wrote:
Sat Dec 05, 2020 5:14 pm
There's a little fan in the internal power supply. I had one customer who kept burning them out somehow.

If you've got the PSU jack you can get the rackmount PSU which I think has no fans.
Ooh, good tip. I'll look for that.

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Re: New Consoles Help

Post by The Scum » Sun Dec 06, 2020 10:25 am

Now you've come full circle.

Fix the old Soundcraft supply to power the new desk.

(A side note on lineage - there was a point where Harman owned Soundcraft, Soundtracs and A&H. All of their desks were pretty similar before that, and the got more similar during. Similar mic pres, EQs, summing, line drivers, etc, choc full of TL07x's and 5532's. They were just provisioned differently - for recording (Ghost & Topaz), live sound (GL's, GB's), maybe some lo-grade broadcast. They're also easy to work on, and Harman had downloadable legacy service docs for each.)
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