We meet up 4 techs and did a A-B listening test. We are all fulltime touring techs with at least 10 years on the road. I studio work as well. Mainly CD masters. No newbie ears in the room to mess up perception

We hooked up both consoles to a MTC 2381studio monitor controller from SPL. It is analog all the way and built to add as little color as possible. As monitor we sat up a D&B Q7 and sat it to full range in the D12 amp. We only listened to one speaker for maximum clarity. We did a passive split on a Beta 58A and carefully matched gain and level on the two mixers. Now we could switch from A to B fast. The listening position could not see the buttons and did not know witch console that was live at any point. The listener could call a switch at any time.

The result? Well I think one had to actually bee present to understand just how small the difference is. During the test none of us could point at the right desk consistently. Once we thought we had figured out what to listen for we pointed at the wrong desk. I thought at one point that the A&H was a tiny bit more “air” bright and still I did not get it right every time. Understand that I could call switch as many times as I wanted and at any point I felt confident I had it I could point at a desk. At any point I could get the desks indentified by calling the consoles by name and then slide directly into a blind test and still none of us got it right every time. They are that identical.

I have participated in a lot of listening tests of AD/DA converters, preamps, speakers and amplifiers. The discussion has always been a matter of taste. I have never before tried that we discussed what we were listening to? That has always been obvious.

The time ran out. We only briefly got to compare the EQ´s but here I am happy to report that we all liked the A&H best witch of course was quite a bump for the guy that bought the SD-8 and had just said out loud “I like the one that´s on now better”.

To compare the two consoles one has to go deeper into the sound of the graphic EQ´s and FX. Here the SD-8 comes with 12 Graphic EQ´s and only standard reverbs and delay. You all know what we got. I have done enough digital summing testing of Logic, Nuendo and Protools to not do it again with these consoles. The calculations might differ from fixed to floating point bit notation but the result is the same. At least close enough to be ignored here. One could argue that we should listen to full range music and apply subs. But HF has always been the hard part in digital sound since a 40 Hz tone has got 1200 notations and a 20 KHz has got 2,4 notations per wave running a sample rate at 48KHz. We concentrated on the HF.

I think I get an equal “discounted” pro price on the two consoles. The SD-8 is at least 2.5 times the price of my T112+IDR 48/24. The SD-8 comes with 8 out. If you want more you have to pay up.

Spread the word so we can get the reputation, respect and demand for our consoles in line with the real life fact of sound quality and features. I know I love my Ilive-T even more now I know that I´m not missing out on sound quality and still got the genius architecture and packed feature set.