Creative Communities of the World Forums

The peer to peer support community for media production professionals.

Activity Forums Creative Community Conversations cross-posted Q: help me find new mixer board for edit bay

  • cross-posted Q: help me find new mixer board for edit bay

    Posted by Mark Suszko on January 24, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    Cross-posted from the audio forum, full-time editors may have a different perspective on this.

    Our 25-year-old, 20-input RAMSA studio board is getting retired soon, could no longer get new or even reconditioned pots for it. I have a short list here, any comments, recommendations or suggestions would be appreciated. If you’ve worked with one of these and love or hate it, or know of a better alternative in the same price range, I’d love to hear from you.

    Yamaha MG24/14FX
    Allen & Heath GL2400-40
    Soundcraft Ghost Le
    Soundcraft B400
    Soundcraft BB100
    Eurodesk MX9000
    Onyx

    Our specific needs: This is for a multipurpose studio control room/editing bay, with four cameras, live mixing up to eight phantom-powered live mics at a time, a phone hybrid for incoming calls, a breakout program line with intercom interrupt for IFB earpieces, and about four 2-channel decks of various formats for tape playbacks, etc.

    The room is used for multicam live shots as well as for old-fashioned linear editing and soon, NLE editing as well. We do satellite teleconferences out of this room, and so the board needs to be able to handle a mix-minus, we’ll need grouping and submix abilities.

    Things we don’t particularly need are any fancy digital features beyond simple EQ’s. Boards that also record or have motorized faders are redundant to our needs. We’re kind of prehistoric here in a way: I’m ashamed to say, the entire plant and all the patch bays are still 2-channel monophonic, not even true stereo, but this has never been an issue for the news, public affairs and training programs we create. Frankly, the Ramsa was perfect and would still be used except it’s worn out and no longer made, and we’re not allowed to buy used or b-stock anyhow. So we need a new board, nothing fancy, but flexible and comprehensive on the basics. There is a bit of urgency here, if I could hear from you within about ten days of posting this, it would help a lot.

    Wayne Vollweiler replied 16 years, 12 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Grinner Hester

    January 30, 2008 at 6:07 pm

    I have worked on or owned a large majority of mixers out there. Ya just won’t find a quicker, easier, better solution than a good ole mackie. My 1604 offers everything I need without hidden routers to trip me up. I use mixers as a big IO only. It does this better than any mixer ont he market, imo.

  • Wayne Vollweiler

    February 1, 2008 at 5:37 pm

    Though the Mackies are at the lower end of the $ scale, you’d probably be happier with the sound quality of the Soundcraft. The Mackies tend to sound their price (to my ears, at least)

  • Grinner Hester

    February 7, 2008 at 4:13 am

    ???
    please ‘splane.

  • Wayne Vollweiler

    February 25, 2008 at 6:47 pm

    Sorry for the delay on this… The Mackie boards are ok and more importantly are inexpensive. They sound fine – not great – fine (to my ears). Their circuitry is not as clean or accurate as many of the higher quality (more expensive) brands. The reason Mackie is so widely used in our industry is that they make acceptable sound at a low price. If you are looking to do better-than-average audio work, my preference would be with a company that has much cleaner electronics. If you have the opportunity, do a side-by-side comparo of similar level boards in a good acoustical environment – you will easily be able to tell the difference.

    If you’re doing mostly work that will end up highly compressed on a website somewhere, it doesn’t make much of a difference what mixer you use. Compression will kill the sound anyway. If you are doing high quality work that will be seen on TV, I want to start with the best quality I can before the network adds it’s own compression before distribution.

    Just my 2 cents.

We use anonymous cookies to give you the best experience we can.
Our Privacy policy | GDPR Policy