Taking the educational benefits of a mixing console beyond its audio capabilities, University Centre Weston (UCW) took the opportunity of the arrival of a new Audient ASP8024 HE to school students in its installation.

‘Several of our year three BA (Hons) Professional Music Performance and Production students worked with our technician Pete West to install and test the ASP8024 HE,’ explains HE Music Curriculum Coordinator, Lee Sullivan. ‘This involved them completely stripping out our previous install, re-thinking the studio configuration and setting to work soldering up and testing all cables and looms.

‘They also used the opportunity to completely redefine our patchbay configuration. They did really well and everything was up and running in three days. This included testing all tie-lines and fixing some wiring issues we’d had for a few years.’

The students’ involvement began with uncrating the desk, through the testing process and on to putting together a guide for other users.

‘Once installed, they thoroughly tested the console, got familiar with operating the HE and wrote a quickstart guide for our other students to refer to,’ Sullivan confirms. ‘Not only did they learn a lot from the process, but the experience is one they can now take forward when securing work in a studio or configuring their own studios.

‘We feel that our music production students need to understand the inner workings of a studio; where and how things connect. We also feel that our degree students should take ownership of the studio and run it like a commercial concern,’ he adds.

The timing of the Audient desk’s arrival – part-way through the academic year – made it important for everyone to get to grips with it as quickly as possible, so they could progress with their studio production portfolios.

‘Once the console was up and running we couldn’t keep our students off it,’ Sullivan reports. ‘ We held a full-day console familiarity workshop to get the students up-to-speed, which was also part delivered by the same students who installed the console.’

Now at the end of the academic year, there is time to reflect on the decision to choose Audient: ‘Brand and company reputation, ease of use, comprehensive feature-set, build quality, sonic characteristics,’ Sullivan lists. ‘Value for money and reliability were also key considerations. There are Audient consoles out there still operating flawlessly after ten years, and that’s what we need – a robust and reliable console that will provide a great return on our investment.

‘We love the sound of the console, the no-nonsense layout, ease of use. It’s perfect for demonstrating desk architecture and signal flow/routing etc,’ he continues. ‘We went for the DLC option and this works really providing just the right level of control in and out of the box. The build quality is awesome and it’s reassuring to know that Audient are UK based and just a phone call away if we do have any issues.’

More: www.audient.com