In The Field
Assured that everything was working properly, I packed up the ProD8 with the gear I was staging for my next gig.
This was a typical corporate show, with a few presenters using computer presentations with audio and some walk in music.
While I had no real need to use the unit, I decided to set it up at FOH anyway and run my iPhone and iPad into it for the walk in/out music summed to mono. I
t worked like a charm, and I could see using it in this application if I ran out of stereo inputs at a show.
A bonus was that I could choose between a 1/4-input or XLR output for each channel that I needed to merge to mono.
At the next gig, with a small jazz band. I used one channel for the bass guitar (a Fender Jazz) and two channels for a stereo hookup of a Yamaha Motif playing mostly piano and some organ sounds.
With this small quartet, dropping a single multi-unit was just as easy as using multiple DIs as the bass player was set up next to the keyboardist. The Pro8D sounded great with both the bass and keyboards.
While I did run the keyboard in stereo, I would not have hesitated to hook up the keyboard into stereo merged mode if I had run out of channels in the mixer or snake. I didn’t use the “thru” jack for the keyboard player because she was happy just having the keyboard in a floor wedge, but I did run out of the ProD8 for the bass player and into his combo amp. The keys and the bass both sounded fine and we had a great show.
The third gig was with a large band whose keyboard player had two keyboards and a rack with two modules. He had a 4-channel DI already mounted in his rack, but I asked him if we could use the ProD8 instead, and he obliged.
We ran the modules in mono, as he prefers, but ran the main keyboard in stereo and the other keyboard in stereo merge mode, instead of his usual mono. He really liked the merge feature, and was surprised that the unit packs eight channels into such a small footprint.
For an audio provider who works with a lot of musical artists, especially ones with a lot of keyboards or sound sources, the Pro8D is a perfect unit. It provides routing options, a great stereo merge to mono feature, and is built to handle the rigors of our business. In addition, it eliminates a bunch of loose DIs and cleans up stage cabling.
U.S. MSRP for the ProD8 is $850.
To read Craig’s full review of the ProD8, and check out other comments from the community as well as to ask questions, go to the Road Test Forum here on PSW.
Craig Leerman is senior contributing editor for Live Sound International and ProSoundWeb, and is the owner of Tech Works, a production company based in Las Vegas.