Thread: Soundcraft Spirit M12 experiences

The Spirit series is a value-engineered console that performs well for its price. The pre-amps are not exciting, but give good results for vocals and instruments. Getting a drum kit to sound good through this level of unit is more of a problem, but keep the gain trims low on the drum channels and make up the levels digitally, and you should get acceptable results.

It's difficult to compare the pre-amps in a value-line mixer with those in similar-priced audio interfaces, but the Spirits I have used do better than most of the low-end pre-amps or interfaces around.

Thanks for the reply. I won't entertain the thought of buying one then. I'd probably be better with an A&H console with direct outputs like the Zed420 or the live/recording console Zed R16. I'm looking around and trying to figure out what the best mixer I can buy around $2000 or less would be. I want good preamps and lots of them. The Zed R16 A/D D/A converters are probably better than my Motu 2408 mk2 so it interests me, but if I'm better off getting something else and plugging direct into the Motu I want to do that. The Motu only has 8 inputs, but I want a 16 channel board for future expansion. For recording drums I have a Roland TD-9KX, but may get a TD-20 some day so I have the individual outputs (hence the future expansion capability of a 16 channel board).