Leipzig, Germany (October 23, 2018)—The SAE Institute in Leipzig has started overhauling its Studio 2, upgrading the room’s console to a 36-channel Audient ASP8024 Heritage Edition with patchbay and Dual Layer Control (DLC).
“It replaced our old and beloved Neve VR Legend console,” said Leo Baron, audio head instructor at the global brand’s Leipzig branch, who specified the desk himself.
“It was not an easy decision to part from that old lady,” he says, referring to the Audient’s 30-year-old predecessor, a desk he had clearly built a strong bond with over the years. “Yet it was not until I started using the Heritage Edition that I realized how convenient it can be to work on a fully functional piece of gear. No missing channel strips waiting for repair, no ‘dicky’ potentiometers…in an educational environment like this, sometimes a desk simply needs to be reliable and working,” he conceded. “Which is exactly how it is with the Audient.”
After recording tracks for their classes, he says, his colleagues told him “that working on the ASP8024-HE was a piece of cake,” citing the microphone preamps and EQs as notable features. “Reliability and clean design make it extremely useable. Everything does exactly what it is supposed to.”
He added, “A mistake that I see a lot of young engineers make, is to look at a screen with their eyes permanently on FFT analyzer tools and fancy graphic plug-in surfaces, rather than using their ears and actually listening to what they are doing. Of course, being able to pop hundreds of plug-ins onto all the DAW tracks is great, but some people forget that simply adjusting a good compressor and EQ correctly could do the job just as well—and quite possibly in less time. One of the things I like about the Audient console is the EQ section; it simply gets you to the expected result in no time.”
Audient • www.audient.com