Line 6 Live Sound News: With a shock entry into the live PA market, Line 6’s Stagescape M20d leads the charge in the form of an astonishing new ‘smart mixing’ system. Practically every feature on this model is ground-breaking, but perhaps best of all is the colourful, highly-responsive touchscreen interface.
The 7” screen on the Stagescape displays relevant icons on a virtual stage (those of you who have recorded with Vienna’s Ensemble Pro will get the idea), allowing you to tap on any instrument and level it quickly and in context across each channel. It makes reacting to a mix a hands-on experience, as you’re able to call up a specific player’s levels in isolation by touching the corresponding instrument on screen.
Auto-sensing connections know when something is plugged in to an input, when you’re using an output and when you’re using a monitor, firing up a channel strip immediately to get stuck in straight away.
The Stagescape’s FX section also looks particularly wonderful – every channel can be tweaked with a dynamic display of effects that allow you to, for instance, tap and drag EQ curves using a clever Tweak Pad X/Y touch interface. All the various options are handled via four stereo master effects engines, powered by 32-bit floating point processing, so there’ll be no lag when you’re up against it and making quick changes. All of these can of course be saved to presets which can be recalled as you need – one engineer can level multiple bands, then, and call up their personal settings the second they hit the stage!
There are also quick-capture settings to record 20 seconds of all input into a hard drive-stored track, which makes for quick soundchecks that the engineer can then take their time over, and automatic multi-band feedback suppression will tidy up your sound.
As you’ll have likely come to expect this year, there’s remote iPad control (from multiple pads, if you wish), so you’ll be able to level things properly from anywhere in the venue. The Stagescape M20d is a game-changer as far as we’re concerned, and a highlight of the show.
