[LAU] Soundcraft Signature 22 MTK mixer/interface

TL;DR: OMFG The delay between announcement of this board and it finally making it out the door has caused a lot of griping on various forums. I pre-ordered this board back in September, and it's finally arrived. It sure seems worth the wait! There's a lot to like about this board. dbx limiters, Ghost preamps, Lexicon effects, they all sound a lot better than I was expecting at this price point. As a live board, it's set up really nicely. The EQ section is interesting - it's asymmetrical, so in the mid-ranges, you've got a wide bandwidth when boosting, and a narrower bandwidth when cutting. The high and low frequency EQs give a tiny boost at the EQ frequency when cutting, and a tiny cut when boosting. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the end results on some electric and acoustic guitars and my voice were very nice. The routing on this board is nice and intuitive. There are 5 AUX busses, 2 of which feed through the Lexicon effects. Each bus can select whether it's fed pre- or post-fader. Each AUX channel has a 1/4" TRS output. In addition to the AUX channels, there are also 4 group busses (from which I assume Soundcraft gets the GB Routing brand from). Each input channel can be routed to the master out, group busses 1 and 2 and group busses 3 and 4. Each group bus has its own 1/4" TRS output jack, and can be routed to the master bus. This gives a lot of options for monitoring. The MTK in the name means multitrack. Where the standard Signature mixers have a 2-in/2-out USB interface, the MTKs send and receive each channel separately, as well as sending the master outputs. The MTKs support 44.1/48kHz sample rates at either 16 or 24 bits. JACK immediately recognized it and set it up at 24/48kHz. The A/D converters sound very clean. I'm satisfied with the test recordings I did with it. The really amazing thing about this is that each channel has a "USB return" switch. When engaged, it acts as an post-gain insert, only over USB. You can effect the channels and send them back to the mixer! I tried this with on a laptop running Arch Linux using Ardour as my DAW. I took in all 24 channels at 24/48kHz and recorded them. I routed each channels output in the DAW to the approriate input channel on the mixer, and threw a bunch of effects on the channels. Even with everything recording and various effects on all the channels, everything was rock solid and ran at 5.33ms round-trip latency! I ran the recording for over 8 hours without a single problem. I could have gotten 12.5 hours of all 24 tracks recorded onto my 240GB SSD, plenty of time for anything I'm going to do. Besides the ability to add effects to a channel, routing through the DAW opens up the ability to mix a live performance via tablet, even though the 22MTK has no facilities for computer control. This relies on the stability of your DAW and its computer, but is definitely worth exploring. There are a few cons to this board. There are no actual channel inserts so you can't patch in external gear. There's no power switch, so the board's live when you plug it in. There is a single global phantom power switch for all mic inputs. None of these are deal-breakers for me, just quirks of the machine. I'm really looking forward to getting out to a gig with this! -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa