Votes - 3, Average rating: 3.7
(
)
)
|
manual abstract
Because, to be very plain spoken, l have never used a single piece of gear that made this much difference in the overall sound of a system, and it will be hard to write about it without sounding like an Aphex shill. So please understand going in that Aphex did not write the review or influence it. They got the same fact check opportunity as any other company, but noth ing else. We even returned the gear in just 72 hours-far less time than we usually take. No money or gear changed hands, and at this point, Aphex is not even an FOH advertiser. Now that that is out of the way...) If someone says the word “Aphex,” your first response will likely be,”Aural Exciter,”right? Yes, that piece is the thing most of us associate with the Sun Valley, Calif. company, but if there is a shred of justice out there in the big wide world, that exchange will soon go like this: “Aphex?””I788.” Marvin Caesar, Aphex presi dent, has been bending ears for a while now about the effects of long mic lines and splitters on a system in terms of both loading and degradation of sound quali ty. He has been an evangelist for the idea of mic-pre’s that live as close to the source as possible to overcome the problem. (BTW, that is the same approach the Yamaha PM1 D, the DiGiCo D5 and the digitally controlled Showconsole use, given the fact that the pre’s are separate from the control surface anyway.) Like many of you, we listened with interest until we realized that what he was proposing meant not using the beloved pre’s in our favorite consoles, which isthe point at which most of our eyes glaze over and we start thinking of possible reasons he could be wrong. Well, he’s right. The Gear The Aphex 1788 is a pretty neat piece of gear. In two rack spaces, you get eight channels of mic pre’s complete with a splitter. Stock, the units provide separate analog outs for FOH and MON, and the optional digital out provides simultane ous digital streams in TDIF, AES/EBU and ADAT LightPipe formats. Note that all three digi tal outs are active at the same time. Recording resolution can be as high as 96 kHz in the AES/EBU stream and 48 kHZ with the others. The crowded back panel has a mic input XLR and FOH (Main) output XLR for each channel, and a 25-pin D-sub (Tascam format) “He was impressed enough with the sonic difference that he is considering buying 24 channels of 1788s instead of a new console. “ for the MON (Aux) output. The optional digital module con sists of a 15-pin D-Sub for the AES, a TDIF D-sub and a Toslink for the ADAT, and two BNCs for word clock in and out.The con trol connectors are MIDI In,Thru and Out, RS232, RS-422 In and RS-422 Link Out.While these control connec tions are computer-type RS422 and 232 connectors, Aphex pro vides a cool little serial/XLR adapter that allows you to run the RS-422 remote signal over a couple of unused snake chan nels. Control of multiple units is made by daisy-chaining via the RS-422 from unit to unit. Aphex provided a hardware remote for this review, but as setup time on our gig was limited, we opted not to use it. I had the advantage of a short tutorial at Aphex prior to the gig, and Paul would have been approaching the system cold. So we decided that I would control the units from MON, rather than having Paul control them from FOH. (Aphex says that when many units are linked together via serial control, the system can be sluggish. Aphex has developed a new control system that uses LAN technology over CAT5. The speed of con trolling 16 units is the same as controlling one of the old units The totally new software is PC and MAC compatible.) It is all solid and well built. The only complaint would be the aforementioned crowding on the back panel-pulling a single XLR connector after everything was plugged in was a bit of a challenge for those of us with stubby fingers. From left to right on the front panel are eight LED ladders for monitoring headroom, with a numbered push-button under each for activating con trol of that channel. Surrounding the meters are indicators for Input Gain (switchable to FOH and MON output levels), mute, phantom power,-26 dB pad, 70 Hz LoCut, polarity reverse and the limiter (one of the unit’s coolest and most useful features). Next to the channel buttons is a switch that allows you to choose multiple channels to control at the same time. (Note that when adjusting gain on multiple chan nels, the changes are relative. In other words if there was a 6dB difference in the channels to begin with, that difference will remain as gain is raised or low ered.) Surrounding the single gain knob are switches to choose between gain stages (input and output for both FOH and MON) and the switches for the options mentioned earlier (phantom power, etc.) Next is the control section, which switches between local control and remote via MIDI, a laptop or the optional remote unit. The Digital section lets you choose internal or external word clock and digital output sampling rate.You get a built- in he...