News

21 Jun 2015

Mixing It Up: Soundcraft Vi5000 and Vi7000

It’s no secret we’re big fans of the Soundcraft Vi3000 at CX – our Gearbox video review is on Soundcraft’s website. So we were really happy to see that Soundcraft have extended the range with the Vi5000 and Vi7000, the big difference being that the new models use remote I/O and are exceptionally configurable. Both control surfaces can mix 128 channels at 48kHz to 32 stereo/mono busses and master, and you can mix 64 channels at 96KHz with a paid upgrade. The Vi5000 gives you 32+4 faders and four touchscreens, the Vi7000 40+4 and five touchscreens.

The Local Rack has 16 analogue line inputs, three analogue mic/line inputs, a talkback mic input and eight pairs of AES/ EBU inputs. Outputs include 16 analogue line, eight pairs of AES/EBU, 3 LCR, local monitor A line, 2 LR local monitor B line and TB line. The standard Vi Stagebox houses 64 analogue mic/line inputs and 32 analogue line outputs. Optional I/O available includes AES/EBU Dante, Blulink, Cobranet, Aviom A-Net16 and Ethersound. The Vi5000 and Vi7000 can also be used with the smaller Compact Stagebox (32 or 48 inputs) or the Mini Stagebox MSB16 or MSB32. Up to five stageboxes can be connected to create a digital patchbay, where the operator can select the sources for the 128 inputs to the console from a selection of inputs available on any of the connected stageboxes.

Eight Lexicon multi-effects units run on-board, as does a BSS graphic EQ on every bus output, and there’s a new emulation of the classic BSS DPR901ii dynamic EQ on the channel strips. Shure have come to the party and provided integration for the ULX-D series, with battery and RF information now available on the channel strip. The operating system is Vistonics, with all of the immediate control and ‘analoguesness’ we have come to love. The Vi5000 and Vi7000 will sell between $75,000 to $100,000 USD ($95,000 to $130,000 AUD) depending on configuration.

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