More ancient history but if you want a photo in front of the console looking like Lee Scratch Perry at the peak of his output and creativity then you need this console! Even if he did end up burying it under 3 feet of sand in his garden when he got a better desk! haha. Some of you were not born in 1971 when this was the coolest portable mixer out there, it came with a 16 channel snake on a reel, and built into a metal shelled road case!! Rock and roll!!
We hook this up as a split for headphone mixes, so in extended overdubs with someone who is savvy and is part of the compositional process you can be in control of your own mix! Or we can track with it to the X-48, or to one of the tape decks. All of these mixers we have sound different and it is certainly a joy to take time and try stuff out on all of them and mix it all together ion the final product, depth of field, diverse colour pallette and a variety of EQ's are all benefits of keeping several cool old desks running like we do!!
I hope some person on Reverb won't mind me quoting a very good description of this mixer:
"Rare mid 70's soundcraft mixing desk. Simple 16 into 2 design as labelled on the panel. These were the precursor to the series II and were quite similar but more compact with only a simple fixed 4 band eq.
These are transformer balanced with Sowter transformers throughout. Has 16 mic pres, line inputs on 1/4" jacks, a dedicated effects return channel. each channel has a clipping light indicator when the channels get into lovely saturation.
It sounds very good, not really what you would expect by looking at it; has a bright, punchy, open and kind of electric sound to it. The eqs are simple but really powerful sounding and sound good even (especially!) at extreme settings, they really encourage tweaking as the result is always musical. Used by lee perry and you can hear this signature eq all over those early dub records."