Gear Hunter

Allen & Heath - ZED-10

Description

ZEDs are great for live mixing! Their layout makes them very easy to use and easy to achieve a great sound. They are also perfect for recording, either a live show or an audio project at home can be built up track by track using the USB digital audio interface.

The flexibility and quality of these mixers make them stand out from the crowd. You can plug your guitars or instruments straight into the class A discrete FET high impedance inputs, cater for up to four microphones, two stereo sources with MP3 player compatibility, separate 2-track record outputs and a stereo playback input for 2-track replay or perhaps interval music from a CD player, XLR main stereo outputs with inserts, comprehensive monitoring with headphones and separate monitor speaker outputs, 48V microphone phantom power, DI level switching for sub mixing, and not least of all, the same digital effects algorithms as those used on our flagship digital consoles costing 150 times as much!

Features
Inputs
One of the great things about the ZED series is the number and variety of things you can plug in. In addition to the sixteen mono channels there are two dual stereo channels, each with a main stereo input on jack sockets and with additional inputs on phono sockets. the USB return can be selected to one of the additional inputs so that it feeds either the main LR bus or the stereo channel.

Guitar DI
In place of the DuoPre, the ZED-10 &10FX have pre-amps similar in design to our MixWizard range of mixers, but with a twist! Inputs 3 & 4 have a high impedance jack input capable of taking either a normal line level or a low level input from a guitar pickup.

These newly designed inputs have been crafted with the aim of replicating the sound of a classic guitar or instrument tube pre-amp in a combo or head amp. An extremely high input impedance ensures loading on pick-ups is minimal and a Class A FET (field effect transistor) circuit powered from 48V is employed to give the valve-like gain stage. There is a gain Boost switch associated with the guitar inputs which boosts gain by 26dB to cater for instruments with very low level outputs and the overdrive characteristics of the guitar inputs are very similar to a valve (tube) circuit, being asymmetric and soft. All this makes for a wonderfully natural sound to be reproduced from the instrument, full of warmth and character.

EQ section
ZED-10 is equipped with a responsive 3-band EQ with MusiQ, an optimised slope (or Q factor) for equalising individual instruments.

Record Bus
A separately switched stereo bus can be routed to from any channel creating a selective recording bus, monitoring bus or stereo clean feed output. You can even route just the effects processor output to this bus and use the mixer as a high end effects unit.

USB audio flexibility
Getting audio to and from a computer easily is now a common requirement for live sound and music production. The way we have implemented this on ZED is super-flexible and super-easy! No longer do you need to fiddle around the back of your PC to get to the soundcard inputs, only to find that the levels are all wrong and noisy. Just plug in a USB lead to your ZED, select the USB routing on the mixer and the device on your computer and that's it! Quality audio to and from your PC or Mac. Three switches provide different send/return configurations for recording, playback and utilising external FX.

Build
The ZED-10 has been designed using individual vertically mounted circuit boards with each rotary control fixed with a metal nut to the front panel - making a much more robust product that will resist damage and give years of reliable use.