Soundcraft’s Vi3000 Digital Live Sound Console

By | December 5, 2014
The Soundcraft Vi3000 Digital Live Sound Console

The Soundcraft Vi3000 Digital Live Sound Console

The Soundcraft Vi3000 Digital Live Sound Console is the latest in the Vi series. It draws inspiration from older consoles like the Vi4 and Vi6, but shows off new features and improvements.  It’s designed for use during live sound scenarios and is a great digital console to have in houses of worship, theatres and music venues.  Let’s take a look at what it has to offer.

The biggest feature the Soundcraft Vi3000 offers is the SpiderCore DSP engine. This digital console produces higher levels of routing and processing power thanks to new processing chips. The processors themselves are housed inside the control surface, an improvement over the Vi4 and Vi6, which both require external processing racks. Furthermore, the SpiderCore DSP engine runs independently of the control surface processor hardware AND the operating software. This means that audio can continue to run in the event that the surface operation encounters a problem.

The new Soundcraft Vi3000 Digital Live Sound Console is beautiful and modern. The mixing channels are arranged in four layers. Outputs are found right on the control surface. 24 true mono/stereo busses  are included, in addition to the Solo, LR and C master busses. 36 split input faders allow for duel engineer operation, a first for digital live sound consoles. FaderGlow technology, a Vi series standard, uses the relation of color to function in order to help the console user (or users) operate multiple faders quickly and efficiently.

To top it all off, Soundcraft included four (yes FOUR!) Vistonics II touchscreens that work with the Vistonics software using high power graphic chips. All four screens are arranged above all four mixing layers respectively, so what screen you look at is where you control.

The fact that the Vi3000 has onboard I/O means that no stagebox is required, although stageboxes can still be connected to the console for an additional separate 64 channels. There are four I/O card slots that can be used with any configuration of XLR inputs and outputs. While the digital console doesn’t have independent effects returns, you can combat this by using input channels. Two D21m option cards offer further I/O expansion.

The new Realtime Rack offers additional hardware-based DSP processing for 16 channels of UAD plugins. This hardware/software unit was designed in collaboration with plugin manufacturer Universal Audio and makes use of 74 industry-standard plugins. You also have the ability to save plugin settings with showfiles.

The rear of the Soundcraft Vi3000

The rear of the Soundcraft Vi3000

The Vi3000 is the first Soundcraft console to offer a built-in Dante connection as a standard. The Dante card offers parallel MADI connections. There are also MIDI, USB, Ethernet and DVI out connections, as well as a redundant power supply.

To sum it up, the Soundcraft Vi3000 is a powerful digital live sound console that boasts more than you could ask for and is a force to be reckoned with!