allen and heath zed 24

anyone use one of these? Im looking to upgrade my mixer next and this thing looks great for the price range its in. I currently have a mackie 802-vlz3, its only 8 channels which isn't enough for me. I want a mixer so that i can eq and get a decent mix before i go into my mbox. My 2kxl has the 8 outs and I'm really looking to take advantage of that. The zed 24 also has 4 aux sends which will be cool to use when tracking out with my sp 404 for effects. i figured id send my mpc 8 outs, my brothers microkorg sometimes, etc, through the mixer and put the mixer main outs to the mbox ins and put the mixers Alt outs to the monitors as well as the mbox outs to my monitors...that way ill be able to track out (one track at a time, i know) without unplugging anything and ill also be able to make beats without turning my mac/mbox on with the Alt outs going to the monitors as well.

anyone have any experience with using 16 channel mixers with an mbox?

also any feedback on these allen and heath boards would be great, they seem awesome.

on my mackie theres a feature that u can have an alt output so i could hook that output up to the input of my mbox and have the mbox hookup up into a channel of the mixer. when u push the mute button it sends that channel to the alt out line. that way its easy to record individual tracks without having to unplug anything. is this a common thing on mixers? i don't have much experience with mixers honestly, any help would be great, thanks...

can any mixer with alt outs do this?

I've had this reguar gig for a few years where I set up a bunch of these with recording gear for lame-ass speaking engagements. Always wondered what kind of "real use" I could put one to and just recently got the chance to put my own gear through one in somebody else's studio.

A&H is usually considered superior to the Mackie for stereo mix recording. I would agree. Sound quality, eq quality and tweakablilty and just general feel and ease of use convinced me.

The basic signal routing and avalable I/O is a different matter, and you may find there's some give & take compared to the Mackies here depending on your needs. The ZED 24 user guide from the A&H site has all the info here.

As far as my uses on that one occasion were concerned, I found only one annoying minus -- the ALT output is intended for a local monitor, but it can only connect via a pair of unbalanced RCAs. The studio's owner was running the balanced main mix output direct into some cheap KRK monitors and recording with a 4 input sound card fed from the aux sends so it didn't matter to him. My use was a bit different as the computer was not avalible and I was concentrating on building a live stereo mix rather than multitracking. Since it really helps to have independent control of the monitor level when I do this, I tried removing the main outs and instead connecting the ALT RCA outs to the RCA inputs on the KRKs. The result was unusable due to severe ground loop noise. With more time to mess with the AC wiring, different RCA cables and/or use of iso boxes I might have been able to reduce or eliminate this problem, but I really shouldn't have to and frankly it baffles me as to why A&H made this one hardware decision on such an otherwise excelent mixer, especially since a balanced monitor output is standard on pretty much every Mackie I've ever seen.

Otherwise thought it was great. I would not personally buy one but that's because I'm moving away from the use of mixers in general. I'm still very happy to use one in somebody else's setup.

Great post, I really appreciate the time u took to post that.

Now the zed 428 comes with 4 busses, couldn't I use the busses in this way? To run different tracks into my interface which is also hooked up to the mixer?

Sure, that would work.

I use a Yamaha N12 firewire board in Logic. Love it. Mic pre's are great(if you don't have a dedicated mic pre for vocals), on board compressor, EQ is NICE, good feel/good build. They also make a smaller board called the N8(I think that's what it is, at least). Check them out, would be worth a look.