Behringer Wing & PreSonus StudioLive 64s Heads Up First Look

he thinks come back to the channel and welcome to the first episode in a short series I'm really excited to share with you in the next few episodes will be checking out the powerful but unassuming Presonus StudioLive 64's side-by-side with the much anticipated behringer wing and to help demonstrate the basics of each system we've got the 16 8 NSB from Presonus and the midas dl 16 stage boxes to try out as well you can follow along at DC sound up comm for details links and more info on everything we cover in this series all in one place we looked at the Presonus StudioLive 16 the 16 are as well as the ear mix stations and the NSP stage boxes previously here in a different series last year on the channel and that got a ton of interest and since then loads of questions have come in and I've been wanting to have a look at the bigger 64 s since I saw it briefly at the NAMM show back in January as you can imagine though a trade show is not the best place to really dig into a console you just kind of get to look at it for a second and the folks that Presonus were awesome and agreed to send over the 64 s as well as another 16 8 even though we looked at it before along with the racket the rack ear kit for us to check out which I'm gonna demonstrate in an upcoming episode for sure and some of their shelves this council has three positions where you can mount that shelf to either put something like an iPad or a computer monitor on there so we'll dive into those as well and see how practical that whole system is pretty cool stuff I've been using it already a little bit since it arrived and have it set up as my primary audio interface here in the workshop for streaming and it's way overkill but it is helping me get familiar with the platform again just using it every day now another name favorite and a topic of tons of online discussion and speculation this year has been the behringer wing with the success of their x32 and the promises that have been made in mostly video format so far about the wing it's clear that they've got everyone's attention right now now much of the anticipation that I've seen online is focused on the DAW and recording studio potential of the surface itself although from my first impressions it would not make a bad console for any number of different installed or portable live applications so no matter what you're into these two consoles for what you might be interested in using them for the question is do they live up to the hype now that's always a good question with new gear and these days it's harder than ever to know if more advanced products like these really do the business when it comes to the features that you really care about now reaching north of 4,500 dollars for either of the console pairs that I have here you're getting into some real money and while there are features on these consoles that could easily demand 10 times the cost from other manufacturers that's absolutely no excuse for surprises when you've got real work to do so in an attempt to cover these consoles in the best possible way I've been digging through questions and comments from my previous videos about the Presonus stuff as well as in forums questions sections on retailers websites and I've been asking on my social media for anybody who is interested to join the DC sound of discord server that I set up and that's linked on the home page at DC sound up comm and leave a question or suggestion or something you'd like to see covered in this series I'm gonna round up all of those questions that come in focusing first on the ones that involve comparisons between the two consoles while we have them here side-by-side it's a really rare opportunity to have all of this gear here together and it's a real challenge to set it up logistically so that's what I'm gonna focus on in the next episode in this series I will take any individual questions that come up about either of the systems and try to cover those in a final wrap-up video as well so first let's take a quick look here today at the basics of what each console is offering so that we're all on the same page together starting out the Presonus seems like an obvious one to start with the name 64's implies a 64 channel console but as with most things these days it's hardly that simple on both of these systems have the potential to start getting a bit confusing pretty quickly but stick with me here and we'll try to cover the bigger points without getting too far off track so I got some notes here to make sure that I keep all of this straight so looking at the consoles just on the surface the Presonus has 33 faders in two different clusters where the behringer wing has a total of only 24 faders but that's broken up into three different groups or clusters mix channels total on the Presonus is 76 mixed channels where the wing is 48 but those 48 or mono or stereo giving you a real total of 96 possible channels of audio to be processed on the Presonus you've got 32 flex mixes which can be aux ends subgroups or numbers 17 through 32 can be set up to act as a matrix now on the wing you've got four main sub groups as well as sixteen aux which can be mono or stereo and that gives you a total of 40 on those between the four mains and the sixteen auxilary the matrix section on the Presonus 64 s again 16 total where's the wing you get 8 and both of those are stereo effects engines we have eight in each with an additional 8 premium on the wing it looks like I got a dig into that a little bit more the literature is not extremely clear about how those are broken up total buses on the Presonus is 43 and on the wing it's 28 but again those are stereo DCA's we have 24 on the Presonus 64 s and I believe 8 on the wing let's take a look 8 on the wing on board as far as inputs and outputs on the 64 s we have 32 microphone inputs XLR and quarter-inch is well line level on all 32 of those on the wing we have eight combo jacks the Presonus also features a stereo in and out on RCA 4 tape recording and playback so that's a nice handy feature the wing does not have anything like that auxiliary input on the Presonus is 2 stereo pairs on quarter-inch and on the wing you have 8 of those so you've got 8 quarter-inch Hogzilla inputs auxilary outputs on the 64's r16 mix outputs plus left right and center or mono assignable output there and on the wing we have eight XLR outputs as well as an additional eight quarter-inch TRS outputs for your auxiliaries monitor output on the Presonus is a stereo quarter-inch pair and there are no dedicated monitor outputs on the behringer wing USB 2.0 interface on both the Presonus will do 64 by 64 channels of recording while the behringer does 48 by 48 SD card recorder a feature that's become really popular in almost every type of mixing board out there now the Presonus has it built in and will do thirty four tracks total to that built-in single card whereas the wing offers that on an expansion card slot and you can use two SD cards at the same time in that option slot and that will give you 64 tracks that's pretty good but that is at the option of using that expansion for something else or having the SD so something to remember there if that's a really important feature to you as far as control you've got one network port on the 64's whereas the wing has a pair of those along with a built-in switch so that's kind of handy something you could use there front of house to connect up other gear you've got one audio network port for AV beyond the 64's where the wing has three aes 50 super mac ports and super mac is their proprietary version of aes 50 so be careful and follow their standards not generally yes 50 stage connect obviously something that only exists on the wing and so far all I can see is an XLR output the rest of it seems to be vaporware at the moment so we'll see if anything ever comes of that but that's promising to do everything connect stage boxes solve all the world's problems on a single XLR cable so be very excited to see that actually come to market MIDI on the wing is very good just old-school MIDI cables both in and out where's the 64's I believe Handel's MIDI over the network so a little bit different implementation on those there GPIO for the wing is very cool with a pair of quarter-inch inputs on the back here for general purpose inputs and outputs GPIO and there's four channels of that fir'd do weird things like if you wanted to have a button that you know muted all the you know inputs for some emergency reason mounted on the wall you could do that with GPIO very neat that they've included that here something you see on much more expensive consoles there's no GPIO input on the surface of the 64's no surprise not something you normally see in these price ranges a lamp socket you've got a BNC on the top of the surface for the Presonus and you've got a four pin XLR back here around the back which is kind of an odd spot for it because a lot of times when you put them on the back the you know obviously it's a right-angle lamp connector it's a it's a right angle XLR connector a lot of times with the lamp sticking up and you know there's there's a couple of inches of overhang from the top of this to where that is on the chassis so I'll have to see if I can get a hold of one of those to see if and for pin lamp actually goes in there that's an awkward placement for sure option cards like we talked on the wing you've got the dual sdcard recorder as an option card which is really nice that comes with the console so very nice of them to include that you can also get a dante card that will do 64 by 64 over dante their support for sound grid cards as well as Madi the StudioLive 64 s while you can't expand the a VB network with other modules there are no expansion slots in the console itself the Wing offers 16 channels of automix we got to check out see how well that works but they're claiming it's kind of a Dan Dugan style auto mix going on they're obviously not using his name the Presonus doesn't have anything like that doll control and integration now that is where the Presonus is already set up it's got a really big ecosystem involved around Studio One for I use that dog it's very cool I use it amongst a few other dogs but it's a really cool doll for what it is and especially for a newer version that's come out fairly recently in the last couple of years I've had a lot of fun with that and the integration with these the last time I tried it was about a year ago but the integration with these consoles and that are extremely tight while the console will also do hu I and Maki control if you want to control other workstations as well now the wing will do both hu I and Maki for using Pro Tools logic all that kind of stuff but they're tight integration da is in the works apparently they've promised it sometime in the next 12-18 or so months that you'll start seeing a beta version of that so for the moment there is no integrated like tightly integrated DAW the way Studio one four works with the StudioLive consoles which is really impressive but they have promised it so again vaporware at the moment but we'll see if anything comes of that down the line now the solo bus last thing I'll mention that's kind of interesting is that the wing comes with a dual solo bus so if you're used to the Yamaha consoles that have that the CL 2 QL per channel you can decide which solo bus that channel goes to really handy if you're doing in ears and floor monitors at the same time and you want to have two different cue buses or if you've got two engineers one working on the surface one on the app and that's something that you don't usually see in consoles again this price point and one final spec that I'll give since it surprised me maybe the most when they arrived here at the shop which is down a flight of stairs is the weight the 64's and it's stage-box are both noticeably lighter than the wing and the dl 16 the wing itself is just over 15 pounds heavier at 52 and change while the 64's comes in at just over 37 pounds it is the same story with DL 16 compared to the NS v 16 and it's nearly double the weight the NSB is about six pounds and the DL 16 is about 11 if you add the rack kit to the NSP 16 eight it does add a couple of pounds to that but it still is considerably lighter although it ends up being a good bit taller so that rack kit turns it into a four you rack mount unit whereas the DL 16 is to you so depending on how you're going to use them whether you're going to put them around the stage carry and loose or back them up those size differences and weight differences could be a consideration but just moving them around the shop here the Presonus feels very easy to move you just pick it up it's got some nice kind of cutouts the wing is fairly easy to handle actually considering its odd-looking shape but that weight is definitely noticeable 52 pounds without a case just the raw console is kind of hefty and I wouldn't necessarily want to move that around by myself if it was in a road case that would be a pretty hefty package I would think so now we all know the details and the basics of what the consoles are offering each of these has an incredibly deep list of features that will be impossible to cover in this series so I'd encourage anyone interested in either of them to let me know what you want to see covered what features are important to you what do you want to know more about and especially what do you want compared in the heads up comparison between the two I'll link the discord down below but you can leave comments here too I'll be checking it regularly as I go you can leave questions suggestions please leave them as soon as possible so I can try to include them and follow along on social media anywhere at DC sound up I'm doing little quick tests every night or two like this one where I yanked out the plug on the wing to see how it recovers and those have been a lot of fun that's all for now thanks for watching and thanks to all the viewers who make this channel possible through their support on patreon links below to join us DC sound up comm for its last shop for stickers if you want to help us keep the lights on while all of the gigs and trade shows have been cancelled hope you're staying safe out there I'll see you next stop you you

Channel: DcSoundOp

Views: 91,759

Keywords: dcsoundop, livesound, audio engineering, proaudio, audio pro, prosound, electronics, audio gear, tech review, behringer wing, presonus studiolive, presonus 64s, studiolive 64s, mixing console, digital mixer, avb network, aes50, midas dl16, behringer x32, presonus mixer, digital snake, nsb 16.8

Id: sDpq8cHga94

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020