"So many people have been asking us to make a console for live for so long and the time has come," states Antony David, managing director at SSL. "It has been a couple of years in the making because we like to get things right at SSL and we are very confident that we have created a console engineers will fall in love with. It is very exciting to be entering a completely new area of the industry, with a new technology platform and a fresh approach to how a live console should sound and how to give engineers a control surface that helps them deliver exceptional performances. We are really looking forward to how the professional live sound community reacts."
Live is a flexible and extremely powerful digital audio console designed specifically to meet the demands of all aspects of live sound production. It is perfectly suited to touring or installation, FOH or monitors, to venues and arenas, houses of worship and concert halls, to anywhere where audio quality is important and engineers require power, complete flexibility and a user interface that puts them in control.
Based on SSL's new Tempest processing platform, Live has plenty of power and it is deployed in a uniquely versatile way. The headline numbers are impressive at the price with 976 inputs & outputs and 192 full processing audio 'paths' at 96kHz. How those 'paths' are configured is extremely flexible with power allocated to Channels, Auxes, Stem Groups and Masters configured to suit the needs of each show. All processing is built into the console surface and it has a collection of I/O connectivity built into the frame. A full range of Stagebox I/O connects to the console via MADI with the potential for larger systems to make use of SSL's own Blacklight technology that carries up to 256 channels of bi-directional audio and control via a single fibre connection.
Says the company, "As has been the case so many times in the last few decades, SSL has taken a fresh look at the way professional engineers work and created an inspired console that builds upon the way things are done today and offers the potential for a new, exciting and more creative way to work tomorrow."
(Jim Evans)
