Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought the StudioLive about a month ago and have been playing with it since then in preparation for winter concert season. The first thing I did was connect a mic to every input and test the gain, routing, and outputs for every channel. Everything worked flawlessly, sounded great, and was easy to do.
Sound Quality
The sound quality on this is amazing. I've been working with Mackie mixers and the low-end A&H one, and the sound is cleaner (absolutely no audible noise even at very high gain). Some people might be worried that the digital EQ would be harsh, but believe me, this sounds just as "analog" as the analog boards I use, and it's actually more precise and more flexible. The quality of the compressor is also great. I've previously only used kind of low-end compressors, and this blows them out of the water. The tone is not colored at all, and I don't hear any weird digital artifacts. I've also pushed the compressor up to limiting, and it's a very smooth sound, not harsh and fuzzy like most digital limiters I've used.
Ease of Use
I love the simplicity and power of the FAT channel. It's great to be able to set up one channel, copy it to all the others, and tweak from there. Routing is also a piece of cake, and the FX interface is intuitive. Overall I think this is very well designed for use in live situations where adjustments have to be immediate.
Features
This is the only board anywhere near this price range that does everything I want - great, clean preamps and mixing; flexible, powerful, sweet-sounding EQ; excellent dynamics processing on every channel (and even the buses!); crystal-clear A/D for recording, with built-in firewire; recording pre or post FAT channel; analog direct outs on every channel right after the preamp; built-in effects that actually sound good.
I think it would be hard to find a live mixer with better sound than this for anywhere near this price. You might be able to find slightly better compression and FX on outboard gear, but it would cost at least $100/channel, and be a pain to patch together in live settings. Not only that, but patch bays and cables add noise that this mixer doesn't have. Plus, this takes no setup time (turn it on, recall settings, go) and is a lot easier to transport (even though the SKB case for this thing is HUGE!). So really I think this is a huge win.
I'm replacing a 16ch mixer, two 8U racks of outboard gear, 2 insert snakes and 2 patch snakes, and an A/D computer interface (E-MU 1616M) with this one piece of equipment that sounds better, cost less in total, and is 100x easier to setup and use. To me, that says 5 stars any day.
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PreSonus StudioLive 16.4.2 16-Channel Digital Mixer w/ FireWire I/OStudioLive is the most powerful and flexible sixteen-channel digital mixer the world has seen. Loaded with sixteen high headroom Class-A XMAX microphone preamplifiers, built-in 28x18 FireWire recording and playback engine, 'Fat-Channel" processing with 4-band EQ's, compressors, limiters and gates, DSP effects, six aux buses, four sub-groups, extensive LED metering, mixer save and recall, channel-strip save/recall/copy/paste, talkback and more, breaking new boundaries for music performance and production
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