Behringer X-32 Italian debut |
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Category: Test
Date: 28/08/2012
BEHRINGER X-32: HAS (WAR) GAME CHANGED?
The first Italian exhibit of the new X-32 digital mixer from the German brand Behringer, was held at the “Capuano Musica” store in Colleferro (near Rome), on the 27th of August 2012.
Besides a Proel delegation (the Italian distributor), Maurizio Curto (Musical Instr. Account Manager) and Andrea Capra (Product Specialist), the presence of people interested in the new mixing machine was quite scarce, about 5-6 persons at 10:30 a.m. At the end of the day, they became not more then of 20. I still wonder why.
The test conditions appeared to be more suitable to musicians rather than audio technicians: the mixer was on a flycase, wired to two 6,5” nearfield studio monitors from Behringer. As the listening area was not so "nearfield" and the location was a warehouse full of gear, we would have preferred a small PA, but we made it just the same!
I must tell that some previously announced optionals, like the snake, personal monitors and splitters from the "ULTRANET" and "AES50" families were not available yet and Andrea Capra himself claimed he saw one of them before… having a good impression. Big deal(!)
The X-32 involved was one of the 3 machines touring around Europe through those hot days.
Mr. Capra started the demo from the back connections:
INs: 32 + 6 XLR jack
OUTs: 16 XLR jack + 6 + 1 AES / EBU + 2 Monitor / C-room
1 ULTRANET
2 AES50s
1 Ethernet
1 USB
1 Firewire
Really good!
Top:
16 faders assignable to inputs or aux sends
8 faders assignable to DCA or masters (AUX / Groups - Matrix - LCR)
1 no-touch-screen display
Some buttons and knobs with leds.
Faders have their mini-LCD color changing. The right section gets 12 "User defined keys & controls" and 6 mute groups.
Now I will be brief and list all the plus & minus, according to my point of view.
PLUS:
1 – Fast start: few seconds and it is ready
2 - Its fans are very silent
3 - It condenses some ergonomic qualities coming from other manufacturer’s tradition, like the strip, the outputs section (Centralogic?), small high-resolution LCDs (you can write three lines, insert colors and icons of your choice )
4 – Each XLR inputs has a phantom power LED status. Useful.
5 - A delay is available for each input
6 – Management is rather immediate and clear: after half an hour, you can pull up a decent mix even without its manual
7 – Firewire Audio Interface with 32 I/O, integrated
8 – Quality effects: internal processors seem to play fine
9 - Good sound: the bit summing engine is detailed, much more than LS9 desks, but nothing to do with Midas PRO6 :-(
10- The preamps work smoothly: no tics or interruptions during gain changes
11- Its "user defined" area, with 24 keys and 12 pots in total, is very useful
12- The monitor / control room section is quite complete, including a useful delay to compensate the distance between speakers and mixer
13- The quality/price ratio, compared to 2012, has no competitor. The X-32 aims to become a "personal mixer" for any engineer, because it’s cheap and effective. Maybe, one day, rental companies will bring everything but the audio and lights mixers, because audio and light engineers will use their own machines?
MINUS:
1- No "slave" sync mode: no word clock, ADAT, S / PDIF... This mixer cannot be slave synced to an external clock, and may generate a digital clock from its AES / EBU only.
2- The channel compressor sounds a bit "squelchy"
3- If you insert a processor into a channel, its latency increases a bit without being re-synced to other channels. Solvable.
4- Channel dynamics implement a useful internal key filter, but whhen you monitor the key frequency changes, it generates loud clicks. Mind the speakers!
5- Pre-release rumors about X-32 mixer, about 1 year and one half ago, mentioned the possibility to do live multitrack recordings connecting a pen-drive or a USB HDD to the machine. This function has disappeared and will not be implemented.
6- At the moment, from the USB port you can play only 16 bit Wav audio files, at the same internal sampling rate frequency. No resample. Will it be improved?
7- Waiting for the integration of ULTRANET and AES50 options.
8- Waiting for the ability to link multiple units and increase the management and power of the whole system: Mr. Capra doesn’t know about it at the moment, but Behringer mentioned something like that in pre-release compaign
9- The off-line editor software has some problems and limitations that should be solved (re-size windows, management of the internal effects). More, the editor does not allow you to save a configuration file on a USB drive which can be read by the X-32. You can to save the file on a laptop and synchronize it via USB. I hope that editor development will be improved good, not following the sad tradition of other products in the past of this brand (Cybermix, DCX2496 and Ultra-Curve editors, etc ...).
10- In the audio channel flow, if you overdrive the compressor section (make-up) or filter section (boosts), won’t find any led showing this distortion. An LS-9 does that, with its little Red Sigma in the display. Solvable, I hope.
So, why showing a Live mixer at the end of the summer? Because it had to be done and somehow so it was good, we had been waiting for that for more than a year! Are we all ready to buy an X-32 and give a meaning to this new game?
V. 1.3 (01/09/2012)
Marco Maffei
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