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"At a street price of about $9,000, this is a pretty sophisticated little console."
Soundcraft offers a group of sophisticated live sound consoles known as the Si Series (Si1, Si2, and Si3, to be exact). They’re quite sophisticated and priced similarly to other church-friendly digital consoles. Soundcraft is a smart organization, and they recognized that there are many churches across the world that would love to have some of that sophistication, but can’t swing $20K-plus for a console. As a budget-limited tech director for my church, the over-arching “bang-for-the buck” criterion is important to me, and it’s pretty clear that maximizing it was a priority for Soundcraft.
The Si Compact series is available in three sizes, 16, 24, and 32 inputs, and all three live up to their designation of “compact,” with the largest of them only occupying a space just over three feet by just under two feet. The 16-input version is actually small enough for rack mounting. They do indeed bring quite a bit of sophistication considering their pricing, and can fit the bill for applications ranging from portable churches to permanent churches that need to transition from analog to digital, but aren’t quite ready for the cost or additional sophistication of large-frame, touring-class consoles. I’ve been thinking a lot about these things recently, having been made aware that our church is being blessed with an upcoming transition from our current status as a portable church, to a higher-profile, permanent location in a strip mall.
Our new location is not particularly large, so my front-of-house space presents some challenges in terms of squeezing everything in. The Si Compact solves much of this challenge due to the remarkable amount of internal signal processing the console offers, eliminating the need for a lot of rack-mounted gear. Some consoles make navigation difficult in an attempt to spare real estate, with a lot of menu-diving to get from A to B, but the Si Compact strikes a nice balance, with a fader, rotary encoder, and mute, select, and solo buttons per channel. There is a “channel strip” section representing all the controls that would exist in each channel of an analog console, and by selecting a channel, the controls for that channel are activated. In terms of the console’s functionality-vs.-footprint, I’d score it as excellent.
Getting to Know the Console
I was happy with the console’s 24 touch-sensitive, long-throw motorized faders—22 channel faders and two master faders. The leftmost master fader controls the left/right stereo bus, and the rightmost master fader controls output of the mono/center bus. In addition to the aforementioned controls on each channel is a four-segment LED meter. I’d like to see more segments, but four is better than nothing. The slots in which the faders move feature light strips that change color, likely LEDs, which facilitate color-coding of the faders. This is good for my brain, making it very easy for me to quickly determine which fader layer I’m looking at—in addition to inputs, the faders also control bus masters, a matrix mixer, and the 28-band graphic EQs that are available on each bus. The rotary encoders at the top of each channel’s controls facilitate three different functions, chosen by three pushbuttons at the right of the control surface—input gain, “filt,” and panning. The “filt” function is a high-pass filter at the input, and the encoder determines cut-off frequency (40 Hz to 1,000 Hz).
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John McJunkin is the CEO of Avalon Podcasting in Chandler, Arizona, which offers high quality podcast production and consultation services to a broad range of clients. He’s also the host of the Podcast Pro Tech & Tips Podcast at www.avalonpodcasting.com.
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