Australia - Elite Sound and Lighting, one of Canberra and the ACT's premier audiovisual production and installation suppliers, has a wide variety of clients from dry-hire to rock'n'roll to corporate and conferencing. Consequently whenever they purchase new equipment the key element is versatility.
"We always spend a lot of time researching products which is exactly what we did when we recently decided to invest in some compact digital audio consoles," commented Darren Russell, Elite's managing director. "We looked at what all the manufacturers in the market had to offer but in terms of versatility and features, we felt that Soundcraft consoles had the edge over the competition."
For Russell, one of the main selling points with the Soundcraft consoles is their ability to either take analogue inputs and outputs on the back of the console or use Cat 5 digital multicore system or a combination of the two.
"That was a large part of the equation for us," Russell said. "Plus we've had some larger, older Soundcraft consoles in our hire department for many years and they've always sounded great and their reliability is always good. The fact that the digital consoles have that Harman pedigree in them is assuring; the effects are Lexicon and the processing is BSS or dbx models. It's all industry standard gear that sounds great."
The result of Elite's research led them to purchase a Soundcraft Si Compact 16 console, a Soundcraft Si Compact 32 console and two Soundcraft Compact Stagebox digital multicore systems.
"For what they are and at the price point they are at, the Soundcraft Si Compact consoles sound amazing," Russell stated. "I guess versatility and features for their price were the main reason for their purchase. Soundcraft added a heap of new functionality in their most recent software upgrade which was great. We had ordered them based on a demo of the previous version so we were delighted to have all these new features."
