A well-kept secret is like a well-told story: its impact lies as much in the surprise as in the narrative itself. Solid State Logic’s introduction of its Live console at the Musikmesse/Prolight + Sound show in Frankfurt in April puts the 44-year-old studio-oriented U.K. company into the live-sound arena in a big way. And the company managed to work on the project for three years without sparking the usual rumor mills.
“We wanted to surprise the industry,” Dan Duffell, SSL’s head of marketing told me. “Sometimes it’s nice to have something to get genuinely excited about.”
Under the Radar
That secrecy was perhaps necessary — it was SSL’s way of giving itself the room it needed to get the desk right. It’s a substantial shift, technologically and culturally, to go from being solely in the music recording and broadcast markets for five decades and then suddenly enter the live sound milieu. First, there are significant technical differences between consoles in the two domains, including group infrastructure and I/O architecture. Then there are the workflow differences between the studio, where engineers can spend entire days on a single channel, and a live performance setting, where everything has to be immediately available at a moment’s notice. Then there are the differences between the users themselves —we just don’t see that many studio engineers with cool nicknames.
Duffell says all of that was taken into account in the development of Live. He describes the console as a “from scratch” new product platform. Yet SSL leveraged some of its existing technologies into Live, such as the SuperAnalogue mic preamps, its renowned stereo bus compressor and Listen Mic Compressor, as well as trends in live-console design — such as the use of MADI to connect large numbers of inputs. The company then combined that with cutting-edge features such as a 19-inch multi-touch tablet display, with a separate system monitor display that addresses live production. But some of the expertise for Live also came from hires made specifically for the console’s development, as well as input from a select group of anonymous FOH mixers who provided their input.
Lessons Learned
It all came about because there was demand, says Duffell, noting that both existing customers and live sound engineers indicated interest in a live-sound console. Live also comes at a time when live music has become a critical revenue component in the music industry, and when conventional recording studios — SSL’s bread and butter market for decades — remain somewhat of an endangered species. Of course, a market landscape in turmoil is nothing new for SSL. The company had to reinvent itself in the 1990s as the mother-ship studio concept began to buckle under the onslaught of personal recording studios that had not the room, the budget or the expertise needed for the battleship console that large traditional studios used to build their rooms and their brands around. SSL lost its balance for a while during that tumultuous transition period, but the company came back with products like the AWS 900 mixer — better suited for the times, but still maintaining the level of sophistication that SSL had been built upon.
It was a remarkable comeback, going from an almost purely bespoke manufacturing model to something closer to a mass professional market, and now SSL is trying to apply that same resourcefulness to an entirely new vertical. They do so at a time when concert-touring revenues are flat, though installed sound (which Live also targets) remains strong. At between $80,000 and $130,000, depending upon configuration, Live is priced towards the middle-high end of the price spectrum, but is also aimed at a cohort for which the SSL brand remains strongly associated with sonic quality. It’s really the workflow that the buying market needs to experience. The console doesn’t ship until September (the few preorders that have taken place are to distributors in the U.S.), and Duffell calls the period between now and then one of “product validation and a market-testing phase,” a chance to introduce the console to possible buyers.
Duffell says SSL isn’t concerned about how crowded the live-sound console marketplace has become in recent years, citing the company’s successes in an equally if not even more crowded one for mid-sized recording consoles. What remains to be seen is how the market reacts to the idea of SSL on the road. Brands that do sell into both sectors, such as Allen & Heath and Harrison, have done so for a long time and aren’t dominant in either category; others, like Neve and Focusrite, have never crossed that line.
The most notable successes in entering the two markets have been Yamaha and Avid, the latter driven in part by integrating Pro Tools early on, anticipating increasing demand for recording shows. SSL’s Live desk is designed to make such multitrack connectivity easy, including a MADI effects loop on the rear panel, and it’s easy to see how the brand will retain its allure for engineers, producers and artists who put a premium on live recordings. SSL could also benefit from the renewed emphasis on the sound quality of music, as evidenced by the the “Sound Quality Matters” initiative from the Recording Academy and the Consumer Electronics Association.
On the other hand, this is still a crowded market segment, and one becoming more so by the year. It’s far from the constricted, rarefied high-end recording studio landscape on which SSL made its mark decades ago. There are a lot of good-sounding consoles out there, and getting the correct workflow and user experience is critical. SSL is extremely good at the former; whether they can connect with FOH users on the latter will be the big test.
