The first installation purchaser of Soundcraft’s Vi7000 digital mixing console is the Melkweg music and arts center in Amsterdam. Already the owner of a Vi4 and Vi6 in its 700-capacity Oude Zaal (Old Room), Melkweg added a pair of Vi7000 consoles as its FOH and monitor consoles for its 1,500-capacity Max hall.
The Vi7000 is an extension of the Vi6 digital console, offering optional 96kHz processing and increased channel counts: ‘Most importantly, the Vi7000 sounds good,’ says Lenno Maaskant, First Engineer at Melkweg. ‘Also, we have a lot of visiting engineers and they vary from 16-year-olds who only know digital desks to veteran engineers who don’t have any experience with digital. The set-up of the Vi7000 is so logical that any mixing engineer will understand it right away. Everything on this desk is one-to-one translated from analog to digital and everything you need is at your fingertips.’
‘As a house engineer, if a visiting engineer has made an error and I need to find out the problem, I don’t need to go through several menus to see what the problem is,’ says Melkweg Sound Engineer, Eric Ankersmit. ‘I have a total view of the desk and that’s what makes it such a great console for a music venue.’
Like the Vi5000, the Vi7000 provides a choice of compact control surfaces with new local rack and active breakout box hardware, delivering simultaneous mixing of up to 128 inputs and 32 mono/stereo buses with up to 384 inputs and outputs in the I/O system allowing unlimited record feeds from all channels. Ultra-low noise mic amplifier designs and 96kHz 40-bit floating point digital audio processing are accompanied by the first digital implementation of the BSS DPR901ii Dynamic EQ adding to the channel processing, while effects contain eight independent Lexicon multi-FX units, and a BSS graphic EQ on every bus output. Both consoles also feature an additional dedicated 64ch Madi interface for Realtime Rack; a collaboration with Universal Audio that gives access to UAD studio plug-ins. Rapid configuration via new encoder assign functions and shortcut keys are joined by a new extension to the Vi’s VM2 radio microphone status monitoring feature, with Shure ULXD systems now recognised alongside AKG’s DMS800 and WMS4500 systems.
‘I really enjoy having all the effects at my fingertips,’ Maaskant says. ‘Also, I can work on the outer screen on the right without interfering with the mixer who’s working on the console. So if you’re hosting a festival and somebody is mixing the band on stage, you can still jump on the board and set up the band that’s coming on next.’
‘The Vi4 and Vi6 consoles will continue to be offered for sale and ongoing support in the same manner as the rest of the Vi Series,’ says Soundcraft Global Sales Director, Dom Harter. ‘Additionally, existing customers can benefit from the Vi4/Vi6 upgrade package to a Vi5000/Vi7000 system details are available from local Soundcraft distributors.’
The consoles were purchased through Audio XL, Soundcraft’s distributor in The Netherlands.
See also:
Soundcraft Vi5000/Vi7000
