by gdougherty » Wed Jan 08, 2014 5:12 pm
I'm on tour at the moment with my new X32 Rack and S16. Rack and a 1U UPS are in a gator soft side wheeled rack that comes in just under 50lbs. I've got extra foam packed in the lid since the cover is almost flush with the rails. The S16 is in a 4U Gator shockmount that would have put me just a bit over 50lbs with the Rack and UPS but otherwise would have been my ideal home for it.
I've had a few small gigs under my belt with the Rack and a summer of touring with the full console. The X32 Mix app on the ipad is definitely the way to go. I don't bother with the windows/Mac editor since the sync is slow and can get out of sync if you change something on the rack. Usage live in playing at the house was fine, but it feels like SAC without any optimization for multichannel control. I haven't touched anything on the rack except for the master volume because the ipad app is so much easier. It's better than the software editor or the console surface for most everything but moving faders or having direct access to things on the UDK's if you have the full console.
I do find myself wishing for a view with 16 channels of fader, maybe a custom channel layout, because stereo channels eat into what I can control on one page and I'm so used to living with the 16 input and 8 DCA arrangement I use on the desk 99% of the time. Because of that it can feel a little slow jumping around at times.
We're 2 shows into 10 days of school assemblies on both coasts and I'm so much happier with it than I was my 24 channel SAC flight rig. I have less mixing power, no plugins and fewer stereo IEM mixes but it's still plenty to work with and the band is all mixing their own IEM's on their iPhones. Our setups and tear downs are short, so being able to walk in, do a line check, a quick portion of a song and let everyone deal with their own monitor tweaks while I tweak the Main out Eq for the venue makes everything more efficient. I do line checks as we connect things, can tweak gains if necessary from the ipad, change output routing while I'm troubleshooting signal connectivity issues at venues, or rearranging outputs between the S16 and Rack outputs.
It cost me more than my 24 channel Profire 2626 based setup including laptop, but not if I'd paid the older price for them and had to buy a SAC license as well. Either way, so far I'm very happy with the Rack, and if it holds up as well as the consoles have for original owners, I can expect several years of use out of it with no problems. Biggest complaints on those seem to be faders and sticky buttons over time and I don't have any of those to deal with. The X32 rack will likely eventually become my monitor console/stage box with an X32 for FOH and may replace SAC entirely though at least it will on the majority of my gigs.
Also worth noting. Summer of X32 and now my Rack in below freezing NY weather for transport have netted me zero crashes and a brilliantly stable ipad app that automatically reconnects and doesn't crash if there are any wifi issues. It's occasionally a touch slow when banking around in the app, but they could easily improve that since it appears to do a requery of the console settings every time you change the view. A smarter app that accepted change pushes from the console in the background and cached all the console data for quick local access would be much more responsive with only slowdowns in meter display.
Core loses the 1/4"'aux in-out which is handy for a full 32 channels plus several music playback sources without DI's. We're using 4 of them for keyboard inputs on this tour, but I have the DI's and could have lived with a Core and pair of S16 on this tour.
http://softwareaudioconsole.wikidot.com The start of a wiki. It's slow going and there's a ton of info that should be in there yet.
Biggest item is the Command Reference on how to do most actions within SAC. It's 90% of what you need for UI proficiency.
g is for George