Producer Tre Sheppard recently took delivery of an Audient Zen in his northern Ireland studio, zero:hour. Read on to find out what he thought --
Simply put, it's fantastic. Solid construction, great design, incredible routing options, amazing feel... and the sound? Well, I'll get to that in a minute.
Now, I'm a console guy for many reasons and my wish list is long (auxes, inserts, cue mixes, multiple outputs, groups, faders, some level of automation, talkback) but I don’t want to have to pay for or maintain a giant console, as budgets just ain’t what they used to be.
Yep, I'm picky. But man, the Zen is all that. (Did you guys design it for me?!)
Functions
The Zen is a killer for routing. All of the direct out possibilities offer so much versatility during recording. I have quite a few flavours of mic pres available and it's a cinch to work with those with the Zen and preserve a pristine signal path straight to my A/D converters when I want to, while retaining the ability to monitor without any latency. The way that the cue bus doubles as an alternate input at mixdown is brilliant, as well making parallel compression and FX so, so easy.
Of course, the summing function on the subgroups makes even more audio trickery possible and it's all in a package that is small enough for my mix room while still having that 'console' visual impact when artists come into the studio.
The layout is intuitive and after the first day or so of mixing I was reaching for stuff pretty automatically, even in my über-dark control room. One of the best things is, that I keep finding cool functions that just make sense in a new hybrid mixing environment. It's so easy to work with my DAW, multiple monitors, inserts, alternate 2 track sources etc...
Sound
So to the sound. Clarity, width and depth. Those are the three things that hit me immediately. It's great! The Zen isn't a super 'colour' console, but I can add colour pretty easily with my outboard. The Zen is more of a clear, but punchy platform to build great mixes on with plenty of width and depth that you can shape to your own auditory design... and that's a very, very good thing.
I have to mention the onboard bus comp as well... it's incredible. I've got some great compressors in my racks and this one sits right up there with them. Great transient handling and response and loads of punch and thickness, plus it's easy to patch elsewhere on your mix if you don't want it on your master bus as it has external outs and ins, which are of course easily selectable from a button on the console - genius! The built-in parallel blend is another great feature and a something I wish I had on every compressor I owned.
I haven't yet done a full tracking session with the Zen, so I can't comment at length on the mic pres. I did use one for a song-writing session last week with an artist, however, where we simply threw a handheld condenser mic up to capture the ideas for his upcoming album. When we listened back to the tracks of him singing and playing the song ideas on an acoustic with the mic just stuck up in front of him, we were both pretty stunned at how good it sounded. So much so, that I now have no reservations at all about using the Zen pres on anything.
Service
My whole Zen experience has been great: wonderful pre-purchase support from my dealer Alex, plenty during installation from the distributor, Garry and the team at Audient, and an absolutely amazing and affordable console with great routing, features and most importantly, a sonic signature that really suits me!
You can't really ask for more, eh?