Behringer X-Air XR18 Desk Review

hello welcome to another site lab today I'm looking at the behringer X X r18 now we know behringer have brought a range of digital mixers these are the x32 x' and they come in sort of large format smaller formats rackmount formats and really rackmount formats and this is sort of the trend that seems to be happening them as digital mixers become more advanced and it's basically the DSP and the i/o that you want the control surfaces the knobs and the faders if you like are being sort of jettisoned in terms of saving cost because now we can control them very a number of things and that's what I've been doing here all the connections across the top as well as the network connectivity MIDI and USB because this this model has got an 18 IO audio interface built-in which really does kind of give you a lot of extra possibilities we've got 16 combi jacks here these are X 32 motors preamps the very same so we know that they sound pretty respectable we've got the first two have got high Z a capability in plug your guitar straight in then we've got auxilary outputs 1 to 6 on XLR main outputs and a stereo line input 17:18 you can have mono or stereo and a headphone out all the connections are across the top oh yeah this is the Wi-Fi aerial as well because coming back over here this has got a built-in Wi-Fi reader in it which means that we can control this via our phone iPad or a computer that's linked to the same network you can either join the network or create its own network I like to say we've also got an Ethernet port here which is what I'm using to control this this is joining our studio network and then the computer that I've got over here is just joining the same network and controlling the the X air now the thing about this is all the like I say all of the connections are on the top apart from the IEC socket here which has a power switch as well now I'm controlling this from a number of different places I've got the software running on the Mac here which is OS X is running under Yosemite but also runs on PC we've also got clients for Android devices so your phones and tablets and iOS as well so a number of ways to control it here yeah this gives you an entire representation of the mixer and I'm also adding a bit of MIDI control into because it does have basic MIDI control don't get too excited this is controlling levels of things like subgroups faders and mutes and we can also do pan control but we can't get really tight in and start niggling with the EQs and the effect settings at least not yet what you heard right the beginning there was just me jamming with a little patch here and using the internal effects because there's some really quite tasty effects as with the x32 as well as the ability to put graphic EQs across things so if you wanted to use it in a live situation monitors and what-have-you the thing about the XA XR 18 is with the 18 IO audio interface it adds a whole lot of other possibilities into it as well and so I can return channels I can record channels so I could use it for a variety of things the previous models or the models lower down the range have less channel count I've also just got a USB slot that allows you to plug in a thumb drive or USB Drive and record a stereo file that could be from the master or buses or whatever there's a lot of reaching potential now if we go to the control software here this is the same as it is on the PC as well this is running on a Mac OS X if I come to the channel what it allows me to do is essentially have the same processing as I would have on an X 32 I can select the input I can have it as the A to D or a USB return here but I can crosspatch both of those inputs to be anywhere I like so I could take the input for channel 9 in this case from any one of the 16 XLR inputs or I could take the USB return from any one of the 18 USB returns and what you've got here as well as the mic gain which goes from minus 12 to plus 60 we've also got USB trim I've trimmed this up here because I did actually record some of this audio but it allows me to flip between the a 2d and USB and match the levels and that's pretty cool because I suppose I could use it as a virtual soundcheck or there might be other reasons why I might want to match the computer return from the line input all of those sort of things so that another handy feature we've also got the ability to insert an effect across the channel of the one of the four effects so we might want to put a compress or processor if we look here there are a number of different compare effects types are also compresses exciters image at edison etc that sort of thing moving along we've got the same we've got the gate a full band eq with low-cut we've also got compressor or which can work as an expander as well as the gate the gate can also be a Ducker which is quite useful and then we've got the sends which allows to configure the scenes in a number of ways we can have them in traditional sub group routing or we can have them so that they are actually from the fader so we've got a certain amount of send to each one very very flexible here six buses and then four effects sends now this little button here global allows us to set them globally or have them on each individual channel as we see fit as well as the six subgroups you've also got DCA's now DCA's are very useful if we go to the software here we can see we've got four DCA groups and DCA's essentially allow you to group faders together like a sub group but the DCA is a sort of master fader for all of them so if you've got effects being sent from those faders when you pull the DCA group down the effects ends get pulled down as well whereas with a sub group if you've got channels sending to effect you can pull the sub group down unless you've routed this the effects to the sub group as well you won't lose the effects right so I've magically appeared the ribbon mic which I've got going into input four on the X itself now if I go to my desk here I've got it coming in on channel 12 because I've patched it across as I can got it set to ad and I've got a bit low-cut now I'm just going to pop my headphones on so I'm just going to put in solo and start to bring the mic gain up one two two two two two you can hear there's a little bit of stepping there it's probably not a parameter you'd want to automate one two two two two two two that sounds and what I've got is in Reaper I'm recording from input 4 because it's the channel input it's the physical input that you recall from not the channel output I'm coming back here and now will I'm going to solo the return as well because if I go to the return I've got the return come about and you can hear there is a bit of a sort of flange II you know it's not a massive delay it's actually quite a short delay and what's happening there is it's got the round trip through the computer and back and I've got it set to 128 samples which isn't massively low but it's quite low and it seems to be working fine obviously this is 40 41 it does 44 1 and 48 sample rates only so a regular contributor gasps William said you must try the tambourine test on mic preamps and a 2ds so I've got a tambourine courtesy of Amazon Prime just literally arrives and what I'm going to do is I'm going to record via free pass you see that meat is there into Reaper and then just play it back so we just go into record ok let's see what that sounds like playback okay to my ears that sounds pretty damn close and it is a difficult test cuz you've got a lot of high frequencies and they got very sharp transients and if you can hear some noise in here as well I should just point out that the fan in my computer is getting crazy because it's so hot in here and it's not anything to do with the night amp noise or anything like that just so you know so now I should take a look at the editors available on iOS or what have you to do that what I've got is my trusty repo drum session which is just what I use to do a number of digital desk so that's what it looks like on this guy then if we go to the iOS version this is running on an iPad which is only iOS 7 and above I might add I can do all of the things that I would expect to be able to do so I've got my gait dynamics ethier I can switch to advanced or the other mode and I've got access to touch screen editing of all of that and also got the same application on Android device oops which ones are solo ads if you see here it's all updated over the network in real time which is you know obviously nice and useful the only thing that I did find in this is something that might be an issue for now is you couldn't in the mixer itself from maybe the desktop application sort of have a master connection and say well you know the bass player only gets access to his wedge and you know the drummer only gets access to this that and the other there doesn't seem to be a way to lock it down in the way that you can with some other digital DES and that could be a bit problematic and you can obviously password protect the network but in the heat of a gig of someone press the wrong button it could have ramifications for the mix so I guess that's a software thing so it could possibly be updated elsewhere so let's just get this mix going again I'm going to switch in the synth part I've got that's quite interesting what's actually happening there is I've got a number of things going on so I've got this rhythmic part on the sub 37 which is go to the gate you can see what I'm doing is I'm actually triggering from channel 2 which is the snare drum so creating this little envelope to trigger it which I'm sitting into some delays then on these low oscillator I'm triggering that from the kick drum with a slightly different envelope and then this kind of high other oscillator which is coming off channel 1 so together it's going my day so I could now perhaps anyway what that's basically showing me is you know I've got quite a complex mix going on here with live inputs being processed by the internal DSP on here together with USB tracks coming off the drums which I'm also processing into a mix I'm controlling it a little bit here I one thing you might notice is I did find certainly on OS X this editor got a bit sluggish it seems to sort of slow down doesn't update quickly doesn't seem to change the speed with which you can update the settings in here but certainly over MIDI but I just found it kind of got a bit bogged down it so on further investigation of this I look at the CPU monitor re presumably using a lot but I'm running a bunch of tracks and some plugins as well X area is up to 35% if I now play the track and they being what I want to do is to with a bit of EQ take it back to their X area is up to 94% and that does seem incredibly high to me and this could present a problem if you want to run the session that you're playing through maybe USB plus control on a computer I mean this isn't a current model it's a 2011 i7 2.4 gigahertz with 16 gigs of RAM so I would have thought it should be able to handle this but you know for instance if you wanted to do deep tinker and twiki real-time EQ via the GUI on this with that level of CPU it starts to get quite sluggish so I'm not quite sure why that is it doesn't use an awful lot of memory but certainly seems to haunt a CPU rather alarmingly a little more on presets you can save individual channels what you have to do is you go to the channels tab at the top here select the channel that you want then you go to the Save button and save channel preset and that allows you to save a channel preset to the location of your choice on the drive also you can copy and paste so if I wanted to copy this channel I can now paste it to another channel I hit the paste button it allows me to paste the configuration and the input the gate EQ or everything so obviously with all of these different settings you know you might want to be able to recall snapshots really really quickly now if I'm doing it here I have to press load and learn are you sure but I can actually program program changes which will recall them instantly so I can recall synapses let's get the mix go so this is my gated run then I'm going to go to my drones come straight back another program change we look at there you can see that it's happening very quickly but the interface is updating very fast right so recall is very quickly I didn't notice any kind of real dropouts or anything so you know that's something you could have really really fast changes in the setup of the mixer being fired off from program changes from your sequencer all that kind of thing so creatively that's going to be a lot of fun whew so for a little box there's an awful lot going on here I've tried to cover everything that I can I mean I can't do everything one of the things I couldn't do is test out the ultra net connection this is allows you to connect up the p16 monitoring system which are the little columns solo monitoring devices that you can maybe attach and have a separate mix for each of the members of the band they could control their own thing but I don't have one of those so I can't say how it works so for $6.99 UK pounds so other currencies will display below you're getting a lot of mix of features in a very small box I think the problem really only lies in the lack of sort of hardcore MIDI or Hardware controller integration it's fantastic that we've got all of these features and that we can access them over software but for me Hardware control of these kind of features is essential and while we've got the basic stuff over MIDI it would be nice to see deeper integration so that we could create custom workflows custom work surfaces for people to have hands-on experience if you just need something tucked away and you flip presets you never need to change it then that's going to be fine but for me I feel like I just need a little bit more Hardware control and as far as I'm concerned I've been talking to the barrage of development team just asking questions and all of these things are coming they're saying yes we've got plans plans of that so definitely a platform that is going to be evolving so once again behringer proved that you can put a lot of features into a very affordable package but if you don't want to spend that $6.99 you also got other options we've got the XR XR 16 which gives you 16 channels and the XA XR 12 which gives you 12 channels of course with both of those you don't get the audio I over USB which the X air 18 does which I think gives it the edge but whichever way you look at it there's a lot of features in a very small box so that's it thanks for watching please do check us out on Twitter and Facebook and don't forget if you're not already subscribed subscribe now

Channel: sonicstate

Views: 158,721

Keywords: electronic music, audio interface, musical gear, mixing desk, rackmount mixer, USB audio, Behringer, music production, musical equipment, X-AIR, digital desk, synth, digital mixer, studio mixer, audio recorder, live mixer, XR-18

Id: jmhQSiQuvXw

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2015