Just recently, my high school auditorium went under the knife for a few months with the promise that when it was done, I would have an actual FOH with a sound console (Woo). It was finally completed about a month ago, and I finally got to go In and play with the board. We were given a soundcraft Si compact 32 instead of the soundcraft GB4 32 like they originally wanted to install. My first reaction was "yay, a digital console," but I soon became very annoyed. To start off with, they could only fit 30 channel faders on the top layer? Come on now, I think that having to go to layer B just to see my last two channels is a little outrageous. But what really got me, was that when you go to the second layer, after your last two channels and stereo input faders there was nothing. In other words layer B had 30 faders, but you could only use four of them for anything. I then began to ravage through the settings looking for a way to patch inputs to these generally useless faders and came up with nothing. I finally admitted defeat and formed my very poor opinion of the console. Before I shoot myself In the foot, I will say tho that this console does have many good features that I like, but the bad always trumps the good. So I got the word a week or two ago that soundcraft released a software upgrade. I quickly installed in on the schools console and wow, what a difference. I am now no longer locked in as any input can be patched to any fader on any of the four layers that the console has (that sort of renders the labels for bus and matrix on the third and fourth layers useless). Over all though, I would like to say that it is one hell of a console with plenty of features that could be indefinitely utilized by a small sound company.
Happy Mixing!
Happy Mixing!