Allen & Heath GLD console – Hands-On Review

It came with a 6 foot CAT5 in purple that matched the console (yay, the color matches!) which is great if you’re doing a basic analog console drop-in replacement.  So I plugged in the CAT5 cable into GLD AR2412 stage rack and turned both on.  It booted extremely quickly which is cool so I was able to quickly dig into the work flow of the console.

Obviously, the first thing you reach for other then the “Select” button of a digital console, is the Preamp section of a console.  The template on the console allowed me to easily push some tracks from my laptop to a pair of self-powered speakers I had in my office.  No issues, and I was up and running just that quick.  I did notice, however, that there is no +48 volt phantom power button physically on the console surface.  You must select the preamp section of the console and then press and hold the +48 volt phantom power option on the screen of the surface.  That’s a design flaw in my opinion.  Not a huge deal, but still a notable missing accessibility feature.  In fact, as you’ll see from the picture below, there seems like there is room for them to have placed that button on the right side of the gain rotary encoder or they could have potentially moved the indicator lights there.  Just my opinion…

Moving forward through the signal flow workspace area, you have an easily accessible high pass filter, access to the Threshold control of your gate (with the rest of the gate controls available on-screen simply by hitting the select button), followed by a fully sweepable, fully Q’able parametric EQ.  If you press the select button in the Parametric EQ section, you’ll be able to bring up the graph on the screen.  The sweepable and filter controls act like any other parametric EQ and the Q controls are easily accessible by pressing and hold the frequency knobs down while turning them making the workflow very quick and easy.  You can easily switch between shelving, cut, and standard filters for the high and low sections of the EQ on the screen.

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