In today’s post, we’ll be reviewing the PreSonus StudioLive 32SC digital mixing board. We’ll be covering:
Why we picked PreSonus
The Setup Process
User Banks
Running Mix Outs
On-board Effects
Digital Snakes
Ease of Implementation
Downsides
After reading, you’ll have a better handle on this digital mixing console, and whether or not it’s the right fit for you and your church.
Why We Picked PreSonus
The PreSonus 32SC isn’t the only digital mixing board out there, in fact, we’ve been using the Midas X32 for 10 years now and I can’t talk about it enough:
So why the change?
PreSonus has updated their digital console. While it is much the same, they’ve improved the DSP (Digital Signal Processing), or the ‘brains’ of the board. This allows you to create more powerful mixes called ‘flex mixes’ (more on those later).
Unlike PreSonus, Behringer and Midas have not upgraded their digital consoles. While we’ve been using the Midas X32 for around 10 years, the lack of upgrades made the PreSonus kind of a no-brainer.
Another reason is because this console is actually a great teaching tool. We want to provide the best resources for Worship Tech School, and the board and companion app are great for demonstrating mixes, routing, and signal processing.
Lastly, this setup is relatively cheap. Including the $2,000 console, a 16 channel stage box at $800, and an 8 channel stage box for $600, that totals to only $3,400. That’s a steal when it comes to cutting edge, professional grade sound equipment.
The Setup Process
For us, it took a good one to two days to get this fully setup and customized to our preferences. So definitely don’t try and set this up on the fly, take some time and get to know it and familiarize your team with it. It’ll make Sundays a lot smoother.
User Banks
The user banks are the way to go when setting up your rig for Sundays. Since you have 16 channels, with their own faders, you can pretty much set up all of your mixes, effects, etc. on one ‘page,’ or bank, and not have to be hunting for the right fader during service. If you do need another bank for the sliders, it’s just one button press away to access the next 16 channels.
The way we have it set up is by combining the first four channels into their own DCA groups. This allows us to turn the whole groups on/off or control the sliders. By moving one slider for the whole group, the connected channels will adjust in real time. After those four, we have our individual breakouts that allow us to access all of our vocal mics, instruments, pastors’ mics, and effects.
Running Mix Outs
Running mix outs for your musicians’ personal in-ear mixes is super easy with the PreSonus. Rather than having to keep track of all of the different inputs and outputs, you can customize each mix according to the user and save them. You can customize up to 16 different mixes, which can be controlled independently from one another by toggling the different mix buttons. Whether you’re using one mix for a mono output or two for a stereo setup, the PreSonus allows you to customize and save each mix according to each musician.
We use the first eight mixes as follows: I (Jake) get mix 1, a mono mix. Sarah, one of our other worship leaders, goes with mix 2. Mix 3 and 4 are free outputs for additional musicians. Mixes 5 and 6 are a stereo mix for our pianist, and 7 and 8 are stereo for the drummer. Overall, the PreSonus makes sending these mixes to different in-ear setups really easy and convenient.
Effects
Similar to the user banks, you can easily access and control all of your effects. You start with four dedicated effects with returns, and they have corresponding short-cut buttons to access the faders. Hit one of those shortcut buttons and you’ll be able to send any of your channels to the effect return. You can also use the effects buttons to add any effect to any channel really easily, without having to flip banks.
Digital Snakes
When you’re getting your rig ready to go, having a clean and organized setup is really the best way to do things. We put our main stage box, with 16 inputs and eight outputs, in our rack with the rest of our mics, in-ears, and other equipment. This functions as our mains stage box that the majority of the musicians plug into. We used our second, smaller eight channel stage box and put it behind the drums, giving the drummer his own dedicated stage box.
What we did was label all of the inputs and outputs. This made setup and tear-down stress-free since anyone could figure out where to plug in. We even labeled all of the inputs for the AVB network (the protocol PreSonus uses to send information to each channel). When you need to make any adjustments, all of this labeling and initial setup makes it quick, clear, and convenient.
Lastly, all we had to do was get all of our musicians setup with the mobile app. From there, they can adjust their in-ears themselves. Once this is done, all you have to do is sound check. For us, since we set up and tear down every week, it takes a little longer to tweak all of the mixes. But if you don’t tear down every week, set up is easy and you can leave it for the next week.
Ease of Implementation
Overall, the PreSonus StudioLive 32SC was fairly easy to install and get set up. Despite only have a day or two to learn, set up, and sound check, everything went really well for the first service.
All of the musicians commented to the team about how their in-ear mixes were cleaner and brighter than before. Once we had sound check done and everyone had their in-ears set up, the PreSonus did the work for us.
The great thing about the StudioLive 32SC is that it’s easy to use and is straight forward, without limiting your ability to customize or curate your sound. Since we had done so much ground-work with the labeling, implementing this new board only a few days before our first service wasn’t a problem at all. As long as you stay organized, this board gives you the tools you need to craft the entire sound of the worship.Downsides
Dante
Unfortunately, one of the largest downsides to this console is that you can’t use Dante. PreSonus opted to go with the AVB protocols and the board doesn’t have any ability to insert the Dante card. If you don’t use Dante it won’t be a big deal, but for us it was quite disappointing since we love Dante so much. We reverted back to using our old audio interfaces, which worked great, but we do miss Dante’s flexibility and convenience.
Mobile App
The mobile app for mixing in-ear’s is a little bit glitchy. All of the functions work properly, so no worries there, but there are a few bugs. You have the ability to do everything you need to get the right mixes, BUT, everytime we exited the app and then went back, it wouldn’t load properly. We had to resort to closing the app and opening it again in order to get it running properly. Once PreSonus fixes this bug it won’t be a problem, but for now it is quite inconvenient.
Touch Screen
The touch screen looks great, but it’s not responsive. If you’re used to your smartphone, this touch screen is going to be really disappointing (it doesn’t even have a scrolling feature!). The nice thing is that you don’t need the touch screen to do anything, most functions can be done through the on-board button selection. It would be nice, however, to have an actual up-to-date touch screen.
Effects
The PreSonus board comes with two main groups of effects: reverb and delay. The great thing is that those are foundational effects so they’ve covered their bases, but it would have been nice to have a few more different types of effects. You do get multiple types of reverbs and delays, but including some more compressors or even choruses would have been great. Again, not a huge deal because you can download some of the effect bundles through their website, but it’s just one of those quality of life things.
Conclusion
This is a console that can do it all.
If you’re looking to make the switch to a digital console, or even looking to replace your old one, you definitely can’t go wrong with the StudioLive 32SC. For an even more in-depth video about full implementation, check out Spencer’s walkthrough.
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