Hi guys- ive been asked for my opinions on hiring and or purchasing a TT24, primarily for use on musical theatre productions. Im not sure at the moment (although it seems suitable), so I thought I'd see what you guys thought.

All opinions greatly appreciated!


:-)



JG

depends on the scale of your musical - you might find your 24 channels of analogue input are not enough, and although it's easy to expand into the digital inputs, there is the extra expense that involves to consider.

that said, I think they are great desks for the money - we have two, one for each theatre. they're very user friendly, and the learning curve from analogue to digital is pretty easy.

don't know anywhere that hire's them though - someone else was on this forum looking for hire sources - don't know if they had any luck.

sorry this is a little but by TT24 I presume you mean the Mackie desk rather than the Breville TT24 4-slice toaster?

??

I've done a fair few musicals where the kettle and other food-related appliances were a LOT more important than the choice of mixer!

Tim

hehe! Thanks for the replies guys.

I think the plan would be to get another mixer (analogue- possibly a yamaha mg32fx to submix bands/orchestras on, put that into the line inputs of the tt24, so the 24 inputs plus the extra lines in would be more than enough.

Anyone had any experience of using a TT24 to run a musical? Is the scene/mute automation easy to do? How about sending midi messages to playbacks for sfx? Is this possible as part of a cue?

:-)

JG

I've never even seen one, but through reading about other peoples experience of them, they seem an ideal contender for small theatre desk. Have a search on here for TT24, and you'll hopefully get a few pointers to Bink's threads on PSW, which are very well worth a read, and he is both a demanding fella and has used TT24 in anger, albeit in corporate land.

The TT24 is a 48 channel desk but with "only" 24 mic preamps, so if you add outboard D/As (Behringer ADAs for example) you can do all your mixing on the TT24, taking advantage of scene recall for different numbers. Although you need to go to layers to get 48 channels onto 24 physical faders, dont forget the TT24 works the same way as an analogue VCA desk, so you have four other faders which can be on the "other" layer to whatever is on top.

In terms of automation, if you've got SFX (or any other show controller) then I'd suggest you let it drive the TT24 rather than the other way round.

Thanks for the pointers- sorry, I didnt make myself clear- I meant sfx as an abbreviation for sound effects on playback sources, not meaning the software.

I havent yet, I cant find anywhere, sorry.

(OT)My apologies to the grammarians for the stray apostrophe that crept in in a previuos post

back to the topic, if you haven't already done it, try calling Mackie to see if they can advise on stockists.
regarding your "extra" line inputs, the 24 analogue channels are either mic or line, so the only way of getting extra channels is by adding mic preamps or a soundcard such as the MOTU 828 (this is the extra cost - the mackie preamps are quite expensive, the motu about £600) which we use to go into the digital layer. Once you've done this, accessing the layer is very straightforward. We also use SFX (the software), but currently that's being run seperately by a second operator - this is because of the peculiarities of the show which is a mixture of 5.1 sound tracks and effects and live interactive stuff. The midi link on the desk I believe becomes operational in the next software issue, and I assume (but don't quote me on this) that it will mean that a midi signal will trigger a snapshot change. snapshots are very easy to record, and can be filtered, which I understand means you can choose to recall an eq change, a processing change, a routing change, a level change or any combination as required, although we haven't used this feature to any real degree yet.

There are also the 8 line inputs which I believe is what the OP was referring to.



I believe that there is already some midi operational though I've not tried it myself.

Oh yes, forgot about the line returns - they appear on bank 3 (returns bank). The midi question I don't know about, when vince was demoing the desk to us, he talked about midi but said he hadn't had time to play with it himself! (this is quite a few months ago.... we need to go and update ourselves.