Now that I've gotten the basics out of the way, there are a few features of this little desk that I think really shine.
First of all, the onboard parametric EQ and dynamics are excellent. Very powerful, very easy to get what I want out of them.
Secondly, the on-board meters are really fantastic. They both hold peaks and offer normal meter ballistics, it is very easy to glance across the console and get an idea of what your desk is doing. Additionally, the console is great about letting you know when you're on the verge of or actually clipping something, somewhere. Channels in the bank you're currently viewing have their entire input meter blink red, channels in the hidden layer have their very own "hidden bank clip" light so it's easy to track down channels that are getting out of hand. There's even a menu option to define where you want that threshold to be, I set it at -3 but it was at -6 dBFS. While I certainly had channels indicate clipping several times, I never heard any audible clipping. I don't know if that means I clipped the pre and it just handled it well, or what, but no complaints here.
It is obvious that the desk is designed to get out of your way as much as possible. It goes out of its way to keep important controls up on faders or pots so you can get in, tweak whatever, get out, and keep mixing the whole time. There was only one time I ever felt caught on the wrong bank, and that was when I had to work with an MC mic on channel 40 (layer 2) while balancing a talent mic on channel 23 (layer 1). It worked out OK.
I would also like to add that, while the labels above each channel are only 6 characters, the desk has a very good shorten-o-matic built in if the channel name you've specified runs longer than that. I had no problem getting most of my labels into 6 characters, but you can have the full channel label come up on the screen ("DRUMKIT") and the LCD above the channel will display it intelligently ("DRMKIT" or something, anyway it was pretty slick).
The DCA and mute group assignments take a little getting used to, had I been a good boy and read the manual I would probably have been a little more on top of them, but 5 minutes of dicking around between shows got me up to speed, and once you know how it's very easy to assign your channels however you need to.
I haven't played with snapshots at all (yet), so I can't speak to how easy that is to use yet. I've been saving the whole desk into a file after each show. Soundco owner Bill Forbes has used the snapshots, however, and he found them easy to use, as evidenced here in this not staged at all photo:
Scott had a little more trouble, however:
Last, but certainly not least, are plugins.
Let me preface this by saying that when I first heard that Digidesign was making a live sound desk and they were going to let you use plugins on it, I thought "Oh, great, more flashy toys to make recording studio guys think they can mix bands live".
Now that I've used them, and especially Digidesign's implementation, I think they're a hell of a good time. The desk has plenty of onboard EQ and dynamics if you don't want to touch them, but mine at least came loaded with some real nice toys that I dug right into once I'd gotten more comfortable on the console (four shows later or so). They're easy to use, sound cool, look cool, have their own set of metering so you can see exactly what's affecting each channel, and are easy to pop in and out and assign. While you can easily get stuck in a whole world of plugin sound, no matter what else you do get the Smack! compressor and put it all over your lead vocal. That honey of a audio machine is the fucking bomb, I want to wake up to it in the morning, I want to have children with it, I want to grow old and die with it.
Unfortunately, while the dynamics and EQ plugins are all pretty cool and pretending I've got a Fairchild 670 on my playback inputs is great, the effects plugins just didn't get me hot and bothered. They're effects, they sound fine, the control is a little limited and I found myself fighting them a little. I'm sure there are some great FX you can buy aftermarket and load in, but the ones I played with that the console came with were underwhelming.
Other little things that were nice is a full 31-band EQ on faders that you can assign to aux mixes, mains, whatever. Easy to get to, easy to use, easy to zero.
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parametric on the main outs would be, y'know, kind of nice... but I couldn't find one.
FX returns are also just a button away on the left-most bank of faders. Button, adjust or mute or whatever, button, back to mixing. Not bad, especially considering that's where my kit resides normally so I usually just left the FX up on that set of faders since I was tweaking their levels more than the kit (which was on my DCAs as well).
A word about reliability, while I'm thinking about it.
Both the surface and the mix rack have redundant PSUs built in. It is unclear to me how easy one would be to replace in the event of an actual failure, but there are certainly enough points of redundancy. Killing one supply in both the console and the mix rack had no effects, although a nice little warning popped up on the LCD screen to let me know I was running half-full.
Since I was pretty sure I'd heard it could do it, I killed both supplies in the surface. Nothing changed, audio continued uninterrupted. Turning the supplies back on brings the surface back up, it came up quickly enough and restored my mix the way it was. I should have timed it, but I certainly didn't feel like it took forever... I would guess 30 seconds?
I'm happy with that.