Digico has been teasing the market with glimpses of the new S21 console for months, posting pictures of pieces of the console and letting out snippets of feature information. They even had a large distributor meeting last month featuring the new S21 at Clair Brothers new 52,000-square-foot Rock Lititz Studio --- a large production and rehearsal studio located near Clair's Lititz, Pennsylvania headquarters. Attendees had turn in their cell phones and cameras before entering in order control the release of too much information on the S21 before its time.
The S21's time came last week with a simultaneous showing at both the NAB Show in Las Vegas and the MusikMesse show in Frankfurt, Germany. Yet, even with the console on display in the cmopany's trade show booth, we still don't have a full press release --- further evidence of Digico's attempt to squeeze out every bit of intrigue and speculation (and social media prognostication) before the official company announcement.
Here's what we do know. The new Digico S21 digital audio mixing console will retail for less than $7000. It will offer 24 mic/line pre amps 12 line outs, a set of AES in/outs, a built-in UB MADI box with a USB-B port so you can take the USB port direct to a Mac or PC that provides access to 48 tracks of multi track recording with just a USB connector. The S21 has two DMI (Digico Multi-channel Interface) ports (car slots) that provides access to Opticore, Dante, Waves, MADI, Aviom, 16-channels of in and out AES in/out, MADI over Cat-5E, MADI over BNC, as well as Calrec Hydra2 and numerous other network protocols.
Interestingly, Digico was quick to elaborate on the benefits of interaction with Calrec, a company much more well known in the high-end broadcast market than Digico. Why? Calrec and Digico now have shared ownership, with Digico's James Gordon leading the new technology group.
Regardless, the Calrec Hydra 2 system is impressive, allowing access to up to 8192 channels of mic preamps, as well as allowing the Digico S21 to digital gain tracking and channel labels.
The S21's surface has 20 faders in two banks of ten, plus a master fader, it has 40 Flexi inputs in mono or stereo, two solo busses in mono or stereo, master left/right, a 10x8 matrix, and 17 Flexi busses that can be made mono or stereo aux sends, mono or stereo groups, four Digitubes, four multi-band compressors, four dynamic EQ's, eight stereo effects, plus every channel has a compressor, limiter, and there is frequency-conscious compression, gating and ducker on each input and output. It also sports eight VCA's, SD10 faders and Super FPGA Chip just like other SD series Digico consoles.
After months of speculation, it's clear the new Digico S21 is as full-featured as we had hoped and less expensive than we anticipated. Having seen it up close at NAB, we can say it's also smaller and sexier than we had expected
