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As mentioned elsewhere in one of the many threads here, I've got some addition experience using my the StudioLive that I thought I'd like to share. (So I might as well add it to this blog to keep it all in one place for anyone who stumbles across it)

I demoed a system last night that used an SL24.4.2 and mixed the whole show from an iPad for the first time. The first act even had an iPad with them and asked if they could control their own monitors. They own an SL16, but did not have the QMix app on their iPad. He downloaded and in 2 minutes he was master of the 4 monitor mixes I had set up. For the other acts, it was nice to be able to be stand right beside them on stage while they told me what they wanted in their monitors. This was a run-and-gun job, so nobody got an official sound-check. So all 3 acts were line-checked and quick monitor adjustments and off we go. Everything worked great but...


Lessons learned:

Lesson #1) Organize your channels - think in blocks of 12 and put the channels that will need the most attention/adjustments on the same screen 1-12 or 13-24
This was a last minute job that popped up and it had to be done completely on the fly. I had virtually no info about the bands or their instrumentation, so I could only guess at the best channel assignments. From what I gathered none of the bands would exceed 12 channels total (thank you edrums), but then a couple guys asked if they could use their perfectly good Sennheiser wireless vocal mics. It is cold & flu season, so I'm 100% in favor of letting anyone use their own vocal mic. But now their vocals are on 13 & 14 and it left me doing a lot of scrolling between mixer pages 1-12 then up to 13-24 to adjust the vocals. Obviously not the end of the world, but not as quick for me to respond as I might have liked.


Lesson #2) Don't trust the in-house Wi-Fi network - signal was strong and everything was beautiful... until the place filled up and apparently other devices were bogging down the router.
I brought my own router, but was lulled into a false sense of security at set-up. I quickly changed it over after losing signal a couple times during the first act. The laptop showed maximum signal strength even while the iPad was barely clinging to the wifi signal. After I made the switch to my own router both were rock solid the rest of the night.


Lesson #3) Pay attention. Without the tactile feel of a button it's extremely easy to bump something you did not mean to adjust. You may be focusing on what your index finger is doing, meanwhile be aware that Mr. Pinkyfinger might be adjusting something you did not intend to control. The SL Remote software doesn't limit the number of controls you can manipulate and without the physical sensation of pressing a button, turning knob, or pushing fader it's easy to hit something accidentally. Hopefully you'll just make a minor volume change and not a Mute, as I had happen once last night. Also, the buttons that select what page of controls you're looking at ( Mixer Overview, Aux Mix Levels, Graphic EQs, Scenes, Settings ) are across the bottom of the iPad screen and also easily bumped by a rouge thumb.


In Review) I would not recommend going solely wireless for a band you aren't familiar with to some extent. This event was a very casual church-based coffee house thing with a very loose atmosphere, but that doesn't mean I'm not trying to be the best soundman I can be. I probably would not have tried this job completely wireless except for two things, #1: it's part of what they wanted to demo and #2: they pretty much have to forgive me if I screw something up.


Footnotes: Two big clumsy thumbs up to the Otterbox. Not only does it provide excellent protection for your iPad, it's stand gives you a couple really nice angles to control the iPad for this kind of work.

And also in case anybody is wondering the fully charged iPad ran almost continuously from 6pm to just shy of midnight and still showed 58% charge. It would go to sleep if left unattended while the bands were setting up or changing over, which was a minimal amount of time. I'd estimate it was powered up at least 5 1/2 of those 6 hours, plus 30-45 minutes prior to the arrival of the first band while I tested everything and EQ'ed the fronts and monitors.

It has happened. I bought an iPad almost exclusively for the purpose of demoing StudioLive mixers (and their remote capabilities). The iPad arrived last Tuesday, the wireless router arrived last Friday. After setting up the network and playing with iPad Friday night I had to demonstrate the SL24.4.2 and remote capabilities the next morning for a handful of music teachers and auditorium types from around the region. The MacBook was able to run Universal Control wirelessly along with StudioOne, and Capture simultaneously. Capture was a more realistic simulation of having a live band. StudioOne gave them a better look at the mixing that would follow. All-in-all, a piece of cake. I didn't have the luxury of having it all in-hand for a month to get really familiar with it, but it was still a pretty set-up and demo.


Today I was leaving to finish up an complete a church system install that included an SL16.4.2 and thought to myself .... mixer in the balcony.... wireless router in-house .... why not take the laptop and iPad? Turns out to be a good call. It's an extremely challenging, big, reverberant, octagonal room and having the iPad linked to the mixer upstairs saved a couple miles of shoe wear. So the iPad and SL Remote rig is going to change the way I do the final set-up too. I was able to walk the sanctuary while the pastor was reading - allowing me to adjust his new headset mic, the pulpit, and lectern mic from a variety of vantage points. From the balcony it would have been 10x more difficult to make those kind of EQ, compressor, expander, low-cut judgments.

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Hi Dave, thanks for posting more on the 24.4.2!
Fun reading your opinions and observations. I am able to run this on my windows boxes no problemo! It just flys along in Capture but I haven't loaded up StudioOne so I'm not sure there. I've been reluctant to activate the software until I was certain which PC I was going to stick with it after testing it all. I'm using Sequoia 11 on all my DAW's and I'm pretty certain if they can handle Sequoia StudioOne is a walk in the park. Sequoia is a big DAW system.

Regarding the make-up gain ... I can definitely can get some noise out of it by adding gain in all stages. I expect it though, don't you? I've never owned a console that pristine that didn't produce noise from lifting gain or adding effects.

A tuned PC, even a bit dated is no sweat but a Mac to me is now a bloated OS that needs a good amount just to be a Mac.

I sound like I am selling this thing but its really quite hard to get over.

Its not high res 88.2 plus... but for song writing, project studios and the gigging band, man... is there a better deal anywhere! Who records that high gaining great benefit with most studios anyway. Certainly not the low end studios who think they are.
To me, this thing just buried the low and middle ground big time. If you aren't using high end converters right off the bat , using the basic $500 mic pre's, everything else is no better. So, either you are going to spend a good chunk on the basic higher end package or be smart. 24 pre's, 10 AUX and all the stuff necessary to make music, buy a nice i5 or i7 CP and get busy. $6 grand and you are recording good enough. Buy mics, cable, treatment, monitors, ... Its hard to not be raving.

I've done one SL vs my Sequoia studio and there is a plain difference but there is a big difference in cost. I record a huge part of my stuff at 24 / 44.1 and it works great. Good enough for MP3.
90% of the crowd, whether they believe it or not sound like demo's compared to an actual studio that has invested $30 grand plus. $4000 of that is in conversion then start adding cable, pre's and software.

To me its like this now...

$500 plus Home studio crowd = garageband, behringer and the like
$6000 = StudioLive Working bands, project studio crowd > done.
$20,000 = FF800 min plus gear Mid Level
$40,000 = off of firewire... Pro Level

I haven't used my ADL 600 with it but I've read somewhere that you trs via inserts and its sweet.

The bigger question is long term reliability.

Looking forward to your comparisons!

You would be limited to 48k if you were using the SL24 as your interface. Also an inherent limitation of the FW400 port. I'd like to compare using the FW interface versus using the analog Direct Outs to an HD24 in the near future and report back to you.

I've taken the Alesis HD24 to a couple band gigs recently, taking the Direct Outs from my Soundcraft so I'll have some music to mix with the StudioLive when I get home. The control surface has become very intuitive to use in a fairly short time.

I should have a new laptop this week to evaluate the software side of things. My old faithful Powerbook Titanium can't Be up upgraded past OS X 10.4.11 (while 10.5 is min. OS for the PreSonus software) and my Windows laptop is not even close to being up to the task. So I've got a new(ish) MacBook Pro running 10.6 on the way.

Dave and Chris:
Thanks for all of the great feedback on the SL. I have had to re-evaluate my opinion of Presonus gear. Sure, they have made some cheaper quality gear, but also some really good stuff. I just stumbled on a package deal that included a ADL600, and I'm very impressed with its' build.
I have been looking at the Yamaha 0196V2, but now I have to consider the SL as a viable contender. All this positive, HONEST feedback, complete with caveats, is really appreciated.

Rockin blog Dave!

I love this thing. I think PreSonus has nailed it so well with the StudioLive its not funny. I seriously wouldn't buy anything else if I was just starting out in the business and on a budget. Its seems so cut and dry. You either use something like this or you invest a lot of money for higher end.
What a great tool for both live and recording and it looks cool too. Add one laptop and you are rolling.

Very glad to hear I had some influence on motivating you to check one out.

Here is a cool video you'll like:

I've been meaning to make some comments on this and Hueseph's blog as they are so closely related. Incidentally I was amused I had a direct link into both blogs as I actually bought a Strat from Tom Lee on Granville about 14 years ago - and can simultaneously prove the title of this blog! :<)

Yes, certainly things are changing within the recording community but it is not just the recording community but the entire music business. The big corporations are still struggling to find a winning business model to suit the way technology has changed forever the old models based on distribution of actual media. The same technology also now allows to have a truly global discussion (excepting a few "blocked" countries!) about all aspects of the business.

This discussion by default allows contributions from myself who unlike many of you, am not a professional recording engineer but a professional electronic design engineer with a healthy love of music and recording. Technology has probably impacted the recording process even more than the multi-national distribution models as it is not just the major impact of the internet but also the availability of recordin gear that could only be dreamt of a few years ago - at prices the enthusiast can seriously contemplate.

There is no doubt that this has been significant as the closure of so many studios around the world testifies. While we could all discuss how sad this is, this would only be to emulate the inertia of the multi nationals with distribution. They can only blame themselves for letting Apple steal the march on them by devising a completely "new" distribution system. Surely we can all agree that they really should have done this for themselves with a little foresight. As it is they have the anathema of having a distribution system outside of their direct control.

I see this as similar problem for the professional recording community. I think this side of the business needs some radical thinking and needs to seriously assess and more importantly, sell, the advantages of a professional studio over the home set up. As I'm not directly in this business it is certainly not my place to tell you how to do it but I think it is not too impertinent to suggest that a radical rethinking of the marketing is now due. Leave it too long and whatever opportunities exist will be gone.

So that's my take on it. Evaluate what unique services you provide and sell them like hell. At the same time take full advantage of the technology available to market and sell the new concepts you need to push to survive. To sit around and bemoan the demise of life as you know it is to make the same mistake as the corporate clowns!

right on Dave. Sad thing is, you don't need to even be a player anymore. You can simply steal it all, loop it all and rap into one mic and call it a day. Long hair was once in fashion, I hope it returns just as I hope the popularity of searching for the best sounding music does again.

Here is another dreamer hoping to break into the business. I wonder what his real love in music is. The sound or the idea of it all.

http://recording.org/cms-comments-ch...recording.html

Hey! I happen to like run-on sentences.

Very well said. Some good points well taken. As much as RO may be a catalyst in the development of home recording, there must be a few who have come through here and have come to the realization that recording is a major undertaking. Not everyone can be good at it.

I'm a hack at best. I understand the lingo and I know how to use the gear but it takes a lot out of me to get any sort of decent recording. If I had a project that I took seriously, I would probably still hire out a proper studio. I have some minor acoustic treatment and my gear is mediocre and that is optimistic. A well equipped room is something to be appreciated. Mind you, having spent time in a proper studio it's easy for me to understand how a good room, good tools and a good engineer can make or break a recording.