Josh Evans made the unfortunate mistake of letting me know that he's working for TC Group now, so I browbeat him until he shipped me one of the new LM26 processors. Or whatever they want to call it... Lake? Lab.Gruppen? Processor? In any case, I imagine this will be of interest to those of us who already have an investment in Lake processing, which has been in limbo for over a year now unless you want to make an investment in Lab.Gruppen amplifiers. Since I represent a powered loudspeaker manufacturer, I have no way to make that work for me, and have been eagerly awaiting the release of this standalone processor.
The unit arrived yesterday, packed in this attractive box, which contained the processor, ethernet cable, power cable, software CD, quick start manual, and AES breakout which I thought was a nice touch.
Functionally, the unit appears to be a return to the Lake processor's origin: a 2x6 processor that networks, updated to the 21st century. You can tell that Lab.Gruppen has redesigned it after the slick look of their amplifiers, but unless I'm missing it nowhere on the unit does it actually say "Lab.Gruppen". Every effort has been made to make this a Lake processor, not a "Lake Processor by X". The most noticeable updates are 1000-T ethernet on the back for running audio and control down, a lockable IEC inlet, and front panel controls. They claim that LCD display is "daylight viewable"... we'll see about that.
Fired up, it's got some pretty lights, which seems to be one of the continuing selling points for the Lake processor. At least these lights make some more sense than the DLP... those front panel meters were pretty, but told me almost nothing about my actual drive levels. Oh, and here's a peek inside.
The LCD display is a little cramped, but conveys plenty of useful information. You'll just have to get close to read it. Unfortunately, the tradition of useless front panel controls is continued from the DLP. It is possible to reset the processor, set delays, levels, and polarity, set input sources and priorities... but not possible to change EQ parameters, crossovers, etc. This was somewhat possible on the DLP, but the interface sucked. This interface is somewhat better, but now you can't change any of those parameters. I'd just like to have an emergency backup in case my laptop goes down, and I have to rough in settings the hard way.
Otherwise, it seems by all accounts to be... a Lake processor. With Dante built in the 2 input limitation doesn't really bother me. It certainly doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as the three outputs to a processing block limitation. If I need to process one input to four outputs, I have to burn an entire module. This isn't Lab.Gruppen's fault, but an annoying inflexibility that was inherited from the original Contour and hasn't changed. If I wanted to process passive boxes, I could just buy your amps, people! This would be less annoying if the software made it easier to group sets of outputs, but it doesn't. While the Lake is a fantastic processor with the killer app interface that lets me get more done in less time, I sure have to fight with it to get it to do what I want.
Bitchfest over, I'm going to rack this puppy this weekend and use it for some additional subwoofer processing.