The Friendly Fires’ FOH engineer Richard ‘Bars’ Barling was one of the first users to put the new Soundcraft Vi1 digital consoles through its paces at a private corporate event at a renowned London Jazz venue in April.
“As we already use the Vi6 on our tours, it was really easy for me to use the Vi1 and its Widescreen Vistonics™ interface right away,” Bars said. “The integrated I/O on the desk meant we could quickly swap it out for the existing house console, and I could just download my usual show file from the Vi6 on my USB key, with minimal adjustments.”
Bars used 24 inputs plus 4 FX for the gig, and the Vi1 easily met all his demands. “I had to just tell everybody that the Vi6 has had a baby!” reported Bars to Andy brown, Head of Digital Console Strategy at Soundcraft Studer, who worked with Bars on the night.
The Vi1 has many of the functions of the larger Vi4 and Vi6 consoles, but in a compact 32-input chassis (expandable to 64 inputs via stagebox) with all I/O integral to the desk.
