Der geile Ami wrote:
A&H is one of hte good companies. I would put faith in their products. The xone mixers ive specced for installs have had problems, but only after spilled drinks. The are thankfully modular designed, so replacing stuff is generally something i can do myself. The mixwiz is a veritable swiss army knife for small live audio applications.
In general, i's advise to invest in something that you dont actually have to travel with. get comfortable with something that promoters can rent locally when you leave town. Mixers are basically commodities, and it would be silly to use up weight requirements and whatnot if you dont have to. Any promoter that cannot locate a suitable mixer is not worth playing for unless you like gambling with your gear. Local gigs are of course potentially different.
I think a dj mixer is perfect to use if you are working with stereo sources. This could mean using laptops, but even stewart walker used a dj mixer when traveling with an mpc and additional sampler. While its nice to have immediate control over every potential sound, moving faders quickly is difficult when chasing 8 or more channels. Mixers for bands include fader groups to help controlling specific sections of instruments, but electronic music live performances do not work quite the same due to looser structure as to what a track needs and whether instruments morph in their dominance. A snare could be a lead in a techno track...
i think its good advice (stereo source - dj mixer) i work with mono sources live so it doesnt apply to me, so the issue of mixers is a very personal one, a dj mixer is way too limited for my live set-up.
also its true that its advisable to have a industry standard mixer ( A&H or Pioneer ) when travelling abroad so you dont have to take your mixer with you. personally i am now planning to do mini tours by car because i have too much gear anyway, and i prefer not to fly. putting any gear in the hold of a plane is out of the question for me now.
at freerotation this year one of the artists equipment was lost at the airport
it turned up 48 hours later just in time for him to do his set. (can you imagine that?)
on the A&H issue, we all know why they became popular, due to endorsement from a certain individual, and they used to be bullet proof and superbly built with quality components.
not anymore.
they have gradually started to take over from the pioneers in clubs, especially in Germany, but how long will this last if their reputation suffers.
it was a big talking point at freerotation this year, i spent the whole weekend running around with mixers under my arm, replacing faulty ones, we even had to send someone on a 250 km round trip to get a replacement as we were starting to run out of mixers, even though we had 3 back-ups (all pioneers, which all worked perfectly)
there were several discussions amongst artists about this issue, and the general feeling was that A&H need to sort this out as people are losing faith.
the faults were not beer spillage related, we had 8 different faults on 3 mixers, two had one of the stereo output channels running quiet.
i swear by the end of the festival i never wanted to see another A&H mixer ever again.
