Thousands of churches use Aviom personal monitors every Sunday. For the past 10 years, Aviom personal mixers have given churches an in-ear monitor experience without the expenses involved with a traditional monitor console and wireless transmitter setup. It's obvious why they are so popular—no one can deny their impact on church production around the world. Now I have never been a big fan of the Aviom system, but a ray of hope came down for me at NAMM 2013 in the form of the A360, Aviom's new and improved personal mixer.
Navigation on the new A360 will be very familiar to anyone who has mixer on one of the company's nearly ubiquitous, blue A16II mixers. Yet, just one glance at the new A360 mixer and you'll realize there's a whole lot more going on. First off, Aviom is really pushing the fact that the new A360 mixer has more channels. The first thing mentioned by the Aviom rep at the NAMM booth was the “36-channel mix engine capable of 17 mono or stereo channels.” That all sounds fancy, but what's really going on is that each channel on the A360 is capable of controlling a stereo input. Stereo inputs would eat up the channels on the older A16II. Often the user was faced with having to mono channels like keyboards and drum overheads. Not anymore—and since all channels can be stereo. And, Aviom has added a nifty, new “Stereo Placement” control that adjusts the width of each channel's stereo image.
The new Dual Profile Channel allows for two independent combinations of settings on a favorite channel. This is another flashy sounding feature, but I think it has practical application. For instance, you could store two volume settings for your lead guitar channel, then with a quick press of a button, the channel changes between those two settings. That's better than always tweaking knobs back and forth.
Also, there's an ambient mic built into the A360, allowing you to blend in some room sound to your mix if you want. In the master section next to the familiar “Bass” and “Treble” controls they've added an “Enhance” control that sounded like a compressor to me. It's a nice way to tighten up your mix.
Since there are so many new controls, it's really nice that Aviom added a USB port on the back that allows you to save your mix for future use. This is a life saver. In the past, I've had players lose their mix right before a service starts, so a USB backup solves this situation instantly.
For current Aviom users, the best news here is that the new A360 is already backward-compatible with your current Aviom system. This seems like an easy win for any Aviom-equipped house of worship ready for an upgrade in capability and control. I spent about 10 minutes with the A360 at Aviom's booth at NAMM in mid January, and I was impressed with the upgrades to the sound. I'll need to hear it in the context of a real working situation to make a final opinion, but it looks like Aviom did a great job of creating a better personal mixer that will remain familiar for its current customer base.
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