Any of you guys ever use them?
I've been looking after the PA systems at a local venue / nightclub recently. It has 3 rooms; 2 of them can be set up either as live venues or as club rooms, while the 3rd (smallest) has shutters which can be opened to make it a bar area for the largest room, or closed to function as a seperate "chill-out" room.
The FoH mixer is wheeled into whichever of the rooms has bands playing, or is packed away for club nights.
The benefits of Soundwebs in this situation are obvious: all the different possible configurations can be pre-programmed, and a simple interface can be designed so that bar managers or promoters can choose the desired set-up for club nights without needing to re-patch anything.
However, I was talking to a guy from a local PA hire company (who seemed to know what he was talking about) who warned me that the Soundwebs don't sound as good as (eg) Omnidrives: specifically, he said that the limiters were inferior, and that the Soundweb hardware is noisy.
This suprised me: I had assumed that the algorithms in the SW would be the same as (or better than) the simpler BSS controllers.
While I have mixed dozens of bands through Soundweb-controlled PAs, I have never configured one myself. anyone have any comments? Should I put Soundwebs on the wish-list, or would I be better off going with something else?
And what about the "London" versions? How much better are they and why?
:?:
Comments
First of all BSS Soundweb is a blank canvas so to speak. It is
First of all BSS Soundweb is a blank canvas so to speak. It is dedicated hardware with dedicated software. But in Soundweb, you can configure it how you need it, pending DSP availabilty. I have had it. I hated it. I did not like having to keep the old PentiumII around to operate the software. No I did not want to upgrade and why should I?
There are other comparable systems out there that are essentially the same type of thing. Rane, TOA, Media Matrix, etc. Analog BSS sounds great IMO. I love the gates and comps. But, you can't say all things BSS sound good any more than you can say all things DBX or x, y, z sound good.
Omnidrive's were great when they came out. Now they are kind of old hat. They have some qwerky user interface issues. Most people don't get them right away.
I think that Media Matrix is far superior to anything else out there. It is the most widely specified and installed for sure. Harmon has decided to push it's communication protocol in all of the brands under it's umbrella. I wonder what is in store for BSS?