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).
The top half of the console's control surface is dominated by the “channel strip” controls—input, dynamics, EQ, and output. The blue-color-coded input section offers eight-segment LED meters (two for stereo inputs), a phantom power button, polarity reverse button, HPF (high-pass filter) bypass button, and encoders for input gain and HPF cutoff, which is mirrored at the “soft knob” encoders on each channel. The green-color-coded gate section offers attack, release, depth, and threshold encoders, along with a bypass button. For me, the cutoff line between good and great in terms of dynamics processing is the capacity to side-chain, and there are indeed rotary encoder knobs to control cutoff of the high-pass and low-pass filters on the Si Compact's side-chain. The compressor controls are also color-coded green, and comprise attack, release, make-up gain, threshold, and ratio. A very nice five-segment LED gain-reduction (GR) meter is featured here as well, along with a bypass button. The red-color-encoded EQ section includes shelving-type HF and LF bands, sweepable from 800 Hz to 20,000 Hz and 22 Hz to 500 Hz, respectively. There are two fully parametric bands in the mids, sweepable from 22 Hz to 20,000 Hz. All bands can boost or cut up to 15 dB, and there is a bypass button as well. The last of the channel strip controls is the yellow-color-coded output section, with knobs determining delay from 0 to 500 samples, panning, and bus routing buttons that determine whether the signal is routed to the stereo bus, mono/center bus, or both.
To the immediate right of the channel strip section is a monitoring/effects section, with eight-segment LED metering for stereo and mono buses, and monitor outputs, along with a monitor level encoder. A touch screen display facilitates navigation through the console's various systems, including signal flow. It's a pretty small screen, but I was pleasantly surprised with its accuracy in terms of what was selected when I touched the screen with my sausage fingers. Below the touch screen are the controls for the four on-board Lexicon digital signal processors, each with reverbs, delays, and modulated effects. Also, below the channel strip section are the console's “TOTEM” buttons that configure control over the console's 14 buses, four matrices, and four effects sends. Finally, above the master faders are navigation and storage buttons, and to the left of these are the buttons that activate the console's four mute groups, along with a mute group set-up button.
Personal Impressions
I found the console's I/O to be very simple—24 balanced XLR inputs for both mic and line levels, 16 balanced XLR outputs, four ¼-inch TRS insert pairs, two stereo ¼-inch TRS analog inputs, AES/EBU I/O, a HiQNet Ethernet port, MIDI in and out, and a word clock port. In addition to this, a card slot facilitates connection via several popular signal protocols, including AES/EBU, Aviom, CobraNet, and MADI. The HiQNet port facilitates the use of stage breakouts via the network. As my church grows and we start to consider more sophistication in terms of monitoring, these digital signal protocols can facilitate the use of “more me” type on-stage mixers for our players and vocalists. This is exactly the kind of potential future sophistication I'd want to see when I upgrade my FOH mixer.
It was very easy for me to get connected and use this console. I always attempt to get as far as possible without having to open a manual in an effort to determine and measure user-friendliness, and I was very happy with the Si Compact in this regard. I did not evaluate it in a real-world church-service situation, but I was able to feed it a multi-track recording and put together a mix just as though I did. Its conventions just make sense, and the Soundcraft's unique TOTEM buttons easily navigate to additional functions, making monitor mixing very easy, for instance. I would not go out on a limb to say that the console would be friendly to beginner volunteers—at least a little experience would be necessary to truly have a handle on it. If you don't have moderately experienced volunteers available, this may not be the console for you. On the flip side of that, an engineer with a satisfactory amount of either analog or digital experience could really coax a great mix out of this console, and deliver nicely sculpted monitor mixes to everyone on stage.
The high-quality analog preamps sound great, and the internal signal processing sounds excellent, as well. I like having the graphic EQ controls available on the faders, and the capacity to side-chain the gates is very nice. As you might imagine, the Lexicon effects sound great, and it's very nice to have four instances available. Also, there's a handy “accessories tray” where you can place an iPad or other stuff you normally keep at your console.
At a street price of about $9,000, this is a pretty sophisticated little console, and is worth checking out. As we start to get moved into our new location, this console will be on my short list.
