Allen&Heath GLD

T

TJ Cornish

Graduate
Jan 13, 2011
1,263
1
0
St. Paul, MN
I got my GLD today. I haven't had a chance to run a gig on it, but did have a few thoughts.

Build quality:
The surface generally seems very well built. The touchscreen is really responsive, and construction feels nice. For some reason I thought the buttons would be hard plastic, but they're soft; not that that means anything. The only thing that's worse than I hoped is there are a couple glued on overlay stickers that seem a little cheap. There is a little noise from the fan on the surface, but not a huge deal.

The dimensions and small weight of the console are incredible for what the board can do. I've ordered a lightweight custom case, and the surface in the case will be about 60lbs - incredible for a 48-channel console.

The AR-2412 rack is lighter than I expected. Mine came with a defective fan - it's really noisy. Other than that, it's fine. I also ordered the expander module, but that hasn't shipped yet.

Software:
The board is generally easy to get around on. I like that the touchscreen supports dragging - both for channel assignments, and also with very IPad-like scrolling in the onboard help.

A few things that are strange and/or I'm missing:
Bus assignment - mono busses and groups can't be added singly - i.e. you can't have 5 mono auxes and 3 groups - you have to have even numbers. This isn't a huge deal, but for fully using the board, this might cost a bus or two.

LR+M main mode - I haven't figured out how to assign separately to the L+R and M. M appears to be just a sum of L+R. I was hoping to use this for group-fed subs, but apparently I actually need to use a "group".

USB recorder: This is really handy. Currently recording is only 16-bit. It would really be great if they allowed the full 24-bit resolution of the board to be recorded, which is especially useful for multi-element events with both loud music and speech where lots of makeup gain is added in post for the quiet parts.

Manual:
The included manual is fairly thin, and my copy was extremely poorly printed. I expect that this will get thicker as time progresses and A&H continues to refine the product.

So far all my complaints are very minor, and this feels like a really solid product. I'm confident that a few rough edges will be dealt with in future software updates.

More thoughts will follow as I get more time on the console.
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

We had our out for the first time this monday.
A gospel group with 17 hendheld mics and a full band (36 used inputs).

From setup to concert there was only one hour and with 30 minutes for linecheck and soundcheck i must say that the mixer performed well.
The sound is smooth and easy to adjust, the eq section performes as estimated.
Compared with our old digital mixer (LS9), the compressor work much better.
The time to test reverbs setting was wery limited so any opinion on those will not be stated.


Cons.
The show was outdoor and the sreen was a little bit diffcould to read, eaven with the LCD light at full power.

There must be a bug with the Matrix section in the first firmvare, when adressing LR to a stereo matrix bus only the left chanel shows up with signal. Hopfuly this will be taken care of in the updates.

I would like to have the channel meaters to be a little more differential, the first light to come on on a lower level, now the signal needs to be quite hot before it is possible to notice.

Summary.
For the price this is a quoite nice product with the digital snake and the plug and play stageboxes. Easy to setup and start to play.
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

TJ Cornish said:
LR+M main mode - I haven't figured out how to assign separately to the L+R and M. M appears to be just a sum of L+R. I was hoping to use this for group-fed subs, but apparently I actually need to use a "group".
Click to expand...
A&H Support helped me through this one. LR+M does actually work perfectly for bus-fed subs. I was looking for a light to show the assigned or not status of inputs. Turns out the indicator is the "ON" mark on the scribble strip. Nevermind.
TJ Cornish said:
USB recorder: This is really handy. Currently recording is only 16-bit. It would really be great if they allowed the full 24-bit resolution of the board to be recorded, which is especially useful for multi-element events with both loud music and speech where lots of makeup gain is added in post for the quiet parts.
Click to expand...
There's a bug with this one too - USB devices aren't auto-detected, so currently it takes a desk reboot to see a USB drive. A&H support commented that they thought this was already fixed, so I'm sure a new fix will be imminent.


I had about an hour and a half on the board last night in my living room. This thing is really jam-packed with stuff. The user-defined keys are really useful, and you can assign a lot of things to them. Copy and Paste is also really powerful. I'm still getting acclimated with what things are hardware buttons vs. things done on the display, but so far it seems like they've made good choices. I really like the EQ controls.

For using the console from a seated position you might want to consider keeping a piece of "audio wood" around to prop up the back of the console. Both the LCD and the scribble strips are tuned for a steeper angle, and are a little hard to see while sitting. The main LCD isn't too bad, the scribble strips are worse.
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

Just finished a week-long conference using the GLD. No reliability issues whatsoever. The big adjustment is learning how to mix with 20 faders, which is not unique to the GLD. I also prefer the Yamaha concepts of "ON" rather than "Mute", and the actual headroom indication of 0dB being the brick wall, rather than the "+dB" concept on the GLD, but I'll get used to it.

I enjoyed the fact that I could swap in a longer piece of Cat5 for this gig - I needed about 170', which would have been a little tight with my 150' analog snake.
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

The few things that I didn't care for on the GLD system was the limited local inputs and I would rather have 2 of the 2412s instead of the 84's. But that is just how I would prefer to have the system setup.

My ideal would be 2 x AR2412 on stage (one on each side) and 8 local inputs for wireless mics/cd player etc.
The Aviom port is a nice add, but for us we didnt want to go with Aviom so it wasn't a feature.

I'd like to see them expand the GLD line to include a rack mount form factor option for the console.
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

Jared Koopman said:
The few things that I didn't care for on the GLD system was the limited local inputs and I would rather have 2 of the 2412s instead of the 84's. But that is just how I would prefer to have the system setup.

My ideal would be 2 x AR2412 on stage (one on each side) and 8 local inputs for wireless mics/cd player etc.
The Aviom port is a nice add, but for us we didnt want to go with Aviom so it wasn't a feature.

I'd like to see them expand the GLD line to include a rack mount form factor option for the console.
Click to expand...

What you're looking for is the iDR-48 mix engine and the control surface of your choice from the iLive series. Either that or ask a major console manufacturer to design a one-off console to your specs.......
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

Jared Koopman said:
The few things that I didn't care for on the GLD system was the limited local inputs and I would rather have 2 of the 2412s instead of the 84's. But that is just how I would prefer to have the system setup.

My ideal would be 2 x AR2412 on stage (one on each side) and 8 local inputs for wireless mics/cd player etc.
The Aviom port is a nice add, but for us we didnt want to go with Aviom so it wasn't a feature.

I'd like to see them expand the GLD line to include a rack mount form factor option for the console.
Click to expand...

I would like to see the range expanded as well. BTW, Aviom is no longer the only personal monitoring choice - A&H introduced their own version that's 40 channels instead of 16.
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

Dick Rees said:
What you're looking for is the iDR-48 mix engine and the control surface of your choice from the iLive series. Either that or ask a major console manufacturer to design a one-off console to your specs.......
Click to expand...

I know but that would mean going with ilive, and I prefer the GLD form factor :( Other features aside I just didn't understand the limitation of only 1 2412 in the system. 2 x 2412 is the same channel count as the double AR84's but in one box.

Well its certainly possible to do one offs...just not the cheapest. :)
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

TJ Cornish said:
You can via Dante (sort of).
Click to expand...

You can get the audio, but would you need the ilive editor running for preamp control?

I saw a similar issue when I'd thought about setting up a basic user PA system using an AR84 and an ME1. The audio would work but you'd need to bring in a GLD every time you wanted to change the preamp gain.

Chris
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

Chris Nixon said:
You can get the audio, but would you need the ilive editor running for preamp control?

I saw a similar issue when I'd thought about setting up a basic user PA system using an AR84 and an ME1. The audio would work but you'd need to bring in a GLD every time you wanted to change the preamp gain.

Chris
Click to expand...
Unlike the ILive racks, the AR boxes have no brains, so you wouldn't even get audio out without the GLD surface.
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

TJ Cornish said:
Unlike the ILive racks, the AR boxes have no brains, so you wouldn't even get audio out without the GLD surface.
Click to expand...

My understanding was that the ME-1 has it's own "brains" but get's it's audio from the dSnake network. I'm not trying to actually set this up but would the dSnake network continue to operate after the GLD was removed, with only an AR2412 and an ME-1 connected? If it would, the ME-1 should operate as a basic mixer as long as the preamps in the AR had been set appropriately.

I know the ME-1 will pick up channel names from the GLD. I use a GLD quite often but I've only had a quick look at an ME-1 at a small trade show.

Chris
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

Chris Nixon said:
My understanding was that the ME-1 has it's own "brains" but get's it's audio from the dSnake network. I'm not trying to actually set this up but would the dSnake network continue to operate after the GLD was removed, with only an AR2412 and an ME-1 connected? If it would, the ME-1 should operate as a basic mixer as long as the preamps in the AR had been set appropriately.

I know the ME-1 will pick up channel names from the GLD. I use a GLD quite often but I've only had a quick look at an ME-1 at a small trade show.

Chris
Click to expand...
the GLD surface provides all processing. No audio without a GLD surface.
 
Re: Allen&Heath GLD

TJ Cornish said:
You can via Dante (sort of). I'm not aware of any more direct control, and I'm pretty sure the xDR-16 doesn't work, unless you can elaborate?
Click to expand...

ACE Card in GLD, to iDR rack. It's expensive, since you're doubling up processing dollars, in both the GLD and the iDR; you're using the GLD CPU.
I'm waiting to hear back about GLD controlling an xDR (or 2 or 3) directly via ACE. It looks like it's a bit out, needing a firmware update for GLD first.
 
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