Which Soundcraft Mixer Sounds Cool?

people used to mod their Soundcraft mixers, because some of the old ones sound cool,

so i do a search on Soundcraft and a zillion models pop up here,

does anybody know which models are supposed to be cool? i want a small one, not a 48 track,

thanks!

1600 is one. I think.

Pretty sure 'Mary jane's last dance' was mixed on one.

They made/make a lot of different types.

I have a series 600 I think sounds pretty good for the money. It has 8 busses and 16 monitors and was a bottom range pro console in the '80s.

The TS24 was quite good, as was the 2400. Try the Soundcraft site for some info on various models. http://www.soundcraft.com/products/products.aspx

The Sapphyre was well-regarded and the Delta would be an excellent secondhand console now. People seem to like that one a lot although I have no experience of it.

Of course there is always the 200b/400b/800b series that were live sound favourites in the 70s/80s. Most have been gigged a lot though, as well as being a bit noisy. They are cheap though, although not always small! It all depends what you want.

Have a look at the Soundcraft forum at Analog Console Forums, http://forum.analogconsole.com/viewforum.php?f=25. This is moderated by a guy who was a design engineer for a period and he always provides interesting responses for people.

hey cool!

that forum looks like the place for this,

thanks for the heads up on the noise, i almost went for a few of these,
http://cgi.ebay.com/Soundcraft-200-Series-channel-strips-model-2001_W0QQitemZ110446355297QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item19b71da361

building a Karoke setup, just need a few channels and a few spares, sum them with resistors,

into the crown amp and we are set. 

Any soundcraft mixer made BEFORE the500/600 series.

Series 1
1s
Series 2
3b
200
200b
400
400b
800b
1600
2400
ts24

Am I missing one??

GARY

I've got a bunch of Soundcraft stuff I rescued from a dumpster outside the Sony scoring stage. I think it's a Delta series rack mount frame and about a dozen channel strips. I grabbed it for parts for my Soundcraft TS24 but then the console went into storage.
I'd be happy to give you anything of interest. I'll go look and see what's there.

I've got a series 800 16 X 8 from '81 thats a pretty decent sounding board for the money. 

I had the master module and some of the inputs modded by Jim Williams and it made a huge difference.

Nearly all of the older 70s/80s models mod up very well.  If I remember correctly Jim told that me that one

of the older models, the Delta 200 fully modded, I believe, was used to mix one of the Yes records with very

good results.  Good bang for the buck.

The 800 series was a workhorse standard.

Both that and the Soundcraft tape machine were (I feel pretty confident) used to record at least one very successful ZZtop album.

We had an 800 with the 24-tk monitor add-on... it worked pretty well.  Some of the 'voodoo chillun' like Jim Williams have a few recipes for cap/op-amp replacement, but they all work pretty well with or without.

No iron in there. All solid-state tranformerless.

Frank Rollen's site has the info on the 2400 series... basically the same thing, but with 24-buss routing (instead of 8-buss), a TRUE 24-monitors, and a more optioned center-section, but basically the same design mic-pre/EQ/Insert.

Wow.... that Avatar is a bit of a flash-back!

Keef

In the past 2 months I've gradually recapped and modded a 200B. It sounds OK stock, EQs are useable, far better than the cheap new chinese mixers, but lacking clarity, loosing bass and eating up transients. Now, with the grounding mod, (mostly) bigger Panasonic FM caps + Wima bypass caps (in the signal path), all power resistors reduced to 10 ohm, the EQ modded and with better caps and the op amps biased into class A via 3.3k resistors it sounds better than I would have believed possible. I don't even see a need to replace the TL072/071 op amps on the channels or 5532 on the master bus/busses.
The 200B or Delta 200 are great to work on because of the modular structure and high quality mechanical parts.

I just bought a 16 stereo x 8 aux x 8 bus SC 800b and I love it. It's really compact, eq is basic but useful and sounds nice, and it's well solid. All the opamps are socketed. Gonna start tweaking it...

Cost me £450 including seven 8way looms and delivery which I thought was pretty good value. Ex-bbc bristol and hardly a mark on it.

CJ

It is worth noting that some of the 200 type channels have a more basic eq than others.  I used to have 16 ch 200b which had 4 band FIXED frequency eq.  Other types of 200 channels have sweepable frequencies.  In practice the fixed freq eq is pretty good because the particular frequencies are well chosen, & I never found I couldn't get something sounding nice.

Rob Flinn said:

CJ

It is worth noting that some of the 200 type channels have a more basic eq than others.  I used to have 16 ch 200b which had 4 band FIXED frequency eq.  Other types of 200 channels have sweepable frequencies.   In practice the fixed freq eq is pretty good because the particular frequencies are well chosen, & I never found I couldn't get something sounding nice.

Click to expand...

The 800b stereo channels also have the 4-band fixed freq eq. Perhaps there wasn't room to have parametric eq? I'd agree with the above that it does the job nicely. If I need something more precise I can route via one or two of the (mono) buses that have full parametric eqs.

I owned a 24 channel Made in England GHOST for several years. Very musical EQ, and nice open Preamps, upgraded with AD OP275 IC OpAmp's. It is not a modular design however, so a little time consuming, to modify etc.