The new 24 and 16-channel 8-bus mixers are designed to “combine Greg Mackie’s practical features for making unpredictable live performance mixing easier with Peter Watts’ high-end studio audio engineering expertise,” according Korg's SoundLink product launch announcement.
James Sajeva is Senior Brand Manager at Korg USA Inc.
CPM: The Korg brand is well known in the church world, but primarily for their keyboards. What caused Korg to branch out and introduce the SoundLink line of mixers?
James Sajeva from Korg: Since the beginning, Korg has used their knowledge and experience to delve into categories beyond synths, including Tuners, DJ products, headphones, KAOSS touch-based effects, even Bluetooth speakers. The MW series is a concept that blends Korg's time-tested effects and DSP with the best of hands-on analog mixing. There is a solid relationship here to synths as well. After all, what are you going to use to mix them all?
CPM: The Korg SoundLink mixer has an exciting set of features. What situations did you have in mind when designing it?
James Sajeva from Korg: The mixer's drive is to make mixing as easy and great-sounding as possible, no matter what level of FOH or studio experience the user has. And with that, it's meant to cover a comprehensive set of uses, from live mixing to live streaming.
CPM: What do you think makes the SoundLink mixer a compelling option for churches?
James Sajeva from Korg: First, there’s the easy, great-sounding mixing with hands-on analog features and Korg's top-notch DSP and effects. Second, it’s an 8-bus system which offers lots of options for sending sound to different places; cry rooms, larger setups, etc. Third, the fact that it offers stereo USB audio lets anyone easily stream polished stereo mixes of their services. We think that’s a really strong feature for churches. Next, our Musician's Phones feature offers a unique ability to mix Auxes and Stereo outputs for musicians using in-ear monitors. It really helps the isolation and "canned" feeling the can come when using IEM’s.
CPM: Is the introduction of the SoundLink mixer part of a more significant push into pro audio?
James Sajeva from Korg: That’s yet to be officially decided, but we think there are significant opportunities to expand the SoundLink platform with the technology we developed with Greg Mackie and Peter Watts.
