Review: Phonic Summit Digital Console
It’s a new, competitively priced digital console sporting plenty of facility, minus the enormous price tag.
By Graeme Hague
3 December 2010
At face value you’d never complain. With a recommended retail price of under $3000 the Phonic Summit Digital Console comes with 16 balanced XLR preamp channels with line inputs, pads and inserts, eight auxiliaries, eight groups, eight ‘multi-outs’ (TRS outputs), AES/EBU and wordclock connections, two internal effects DSPs, flying faders and a full-colour 180mm touchscreen. Chuck in another $300 and you’ll get an expansion card that provides either USB 2.0 or Firewire 16×16 connection to your DAW of choice. I mean, for goodness’ sake – the Summit could burst into flames the first time you power it up and you’d still think you got a good deal.
It certainly looks an impressive bit of gear and is yet more evidence that the behemoth of cheap Asian manufacturing (in this case, Taiwan) knows no bounds. The question is, as always; does it live up to the promise of its long feature list?
My first impression of the Summit was an unfortunate one. Straight out of the box the touchscreen was ever-so-slightly crooked in its mounting. Nothing drastic, but as a passer by commented, it’s like having the steering wheel of your car off-centre – annoying. I wondered if this was indicative of poor quality control coming out of the factory, but I’m giving Phonic the benefit of the doubt. We all make mistakes and
not all of them can be divorced – sorry, fixed – before they leave the country.
Second impression was way better. The Summit has a black casing, black or grey knobs and buttons with white labeling and minimal dark red artwork. It looks quite professional, cool and retro (dare I say like early Yamaha powered mixers), and a far cry from some of the bright, shiny silver things we often see today. I really like it. The mixer has a comfortingly large footprint as well – it looks the real deal. Things were back on track and it was time to fire up the console for some fun.
So I booted it up… and amazingly, this precedure took almost two and a half minutes. I tried a few experiments thinking this may have been a first-time-up anomaly since part of the process is a self-test procedure, but no – it takes that long every time (and the manual confirms it, but who checks the manual first?). I figured this was no big deal – and once you’re conscious of the time it takes it doesn’t seem that excessive – except that waiting this long for the console to reboot every time power drops out might try your patience. Then I discovered a serious issue. The Summit doesn’t recall its last status on power-up, but rather, goes back to default settings. So if you’ve set up the mix from hell and suddenly lose power, not only do you have to wait forever for the console to reboot, but your mix is gone! More on this later.
When the touchscreen came to life I was back to being annoyed. Here, allow me a small rant against Steve Jobs, the founding father of Apple Computers and inventor of icon-driven software.
Yes, touchscreens need something you can touch to access a menu, but do we really need a dinky little picture of a spanner for Utilities or a colourful 3D cog for Setup? Thankfully, selecting any of the 10 cheesy icons on the main screen quickly takes you to a much more business-like scene. There’s a choice of View, which is an overview of any selected individual channel with small sections devoted to EQ, Compression, Aux and Group assignments, then full-page menus for these, plus Patch, Fader and Meter pages. It’s all pretty self-explanatory and straightforward.
NEED TO KNOW
WHO’S SUMMIT-BOUND?
Or is it? Just who is going to buy a digital console like the Summit and will they cope with this GUI-style interface? We can forget worrying about large production companies for the moment, because while they’ll find a dozen uses every week for a clever little desk like this, anyone with a D5 or M7CL in the racks will easily navigate around the Summit in no time. But aren’t ‘affordable’ digital desks like the Summit opening up a whole new market? At this price-point and with a healthy channel and aux count, the Summit will tempt a lot of users into making their first leap from analogue desks with effects racks across to a digital mixer. Will it be a difficult transition? The word intuitive –much-loved by software and hardware developers – suddenly rears its italicised head. ‘Intuitive’ means you never have to read the instruction manual, right?
For a start, newcomers to digital desks might find the Summit a little frustrating from the way Phonic has played it safe with signal routing, mainly because so many things need to be turned on. For example, turning on a channel and pushing up a fader isn’t enough. In that channel you also have to turn on the routing to the Main outputs, then the Mains itself has to be turned on. Start dabbling with aux sends or grouping and you’ll no doubt experience a puzzling minute or so of silence while you try to figure out exactly what’s still not on yet. Setting up effects from an Aux and returning through a Multi is a bit daunting too, but in fact it does make sense in a digital-desk kind of approach. In some ways the Summit is making you think twice about what you’re doing – and that’s okay. Still, what I’m suggesting is that grizzled veterans of analogue consoles may get peeved. They’re used to something happening when they turn a knob or slide a fader. They’ll have to rethink their thinking and for that they’re going to need the manual.
I’m certainly no novice when it comes to digital desks, but I was tested when I first took the Summit on the road. Local lads, Delayed Reaction, rashly agreed to let me run the console at one of their gigs and after the first 20 minutes of setting up, the band started to look nervous when I was getting absolutely nothing out of FOH. It turned out that both FOH speakers had been totally blown by a previous user – what are the odds of that? Backup speakers hastily dragged from the trailer turned our setup further into a mad rush. With seconds to spare and next to no sound-check the band crashed into action. Frantically I began putting together a decent mix before the first chorus – then the bloody publican turned the lights out. Not only was I learning a new digital desk, but now I had to do it fast and in pitch darkness.
Thank goodness for intuition after all.
POINTY END OF THE SUMMIT
The Summit’s channel buttons for Select, Solo and On have different coloured LEDs, and between these showing where faders and buttons were located and the large touchscreen glowing with plenty of info, things went well. I mentally adjusted to the digital mixer quickly and soon had those faders flying perfectly in formation. The only other serious issue I had was discovering later that the band had a bar-tab and hadn’t told me. Bastards.
The touchscreen provides comprehensive controls for individual channels and it really demands a stylus of some kind. Using your fingertips will suffice at the expense of finesse and occasionally won’t work, whereas a positive poke at the glass with something pointy will get a response every time. Things like EQ curves can be drawn in, but rotary or fader levels need to be selected either by touch or with up/down buttons, and then entered with a data wheel beside the screen. Disappointingly, there’s no master channel strip or ‘Fat’ channel with encoders for plug-in tweaking. The data wheel is all you get and – sorry Phonic – but it’s mush. There’s no tactile feel and its response wavers between sluggish and unpredictable, depending on how fast you crank it. Values can even run on after you’ve stopped. By contrast, the only other real knobs on the desk – the gain controls for each channel – feel smooth and accurate, so it’s not like Phonic skimped on components.
Select buttons determine what the 16 faders will do, altering the entire landscape of the desk. Fader Mode turns them into send levels for the eight auxes from each channel, then there are three Layer Modes of Channel, Aux/Group and last Multi, which also includes FX send levels, AES/EBU input and Control Room volume. Labeling across the bottom of the 100mm faders for each mode is clear and works well (unless the bloody publican turns the bloody lights off). I had my doubts, but it quickly becomes second nature to switch between modes as you mix live. For example, I like to ride effects levels during some songs and that required swapping from Channel mode to Multi mode – effects can’t be returned into a channel without a physical patch – and it didn’t get as awkward as I’d feared. The faders had always re-adjusted rapidly into place before I’d grabbed for the right one.
I’ll admit, I’d done some homework on the console before the show and that’s half the secret. You can create presets on channels for all the DSP effects including EQ and compression. The more you use the Summit, the more your library of presets will grow and make setups much easier. The entire console configuration can be saved as a Scene and I’d already saved a standard ‘four foldback sends and two effects’ type of scene including a channel list the band had emailed beforehand – and this, by the way, can be used as a safeguard against that unexpected power-down killing your mix. However, it’s not good that you have to save your current desk status over and over again just in case some noddy trips on the power cord. The Summit’s two internal effects are the usual suspects and of good quality, although the Tap button for the delay both on the touchscreen and the button beside the data wheel was hopelessly inconsistent.
I mentally adjusted to the digital mixer quickly and soon had those faders flying perfectly in formation
RE-TAKING THE SUMMIT
The Summit’s alter ego is as a centerpiece for a home or project studio using the expansion card. The card offers USB or Firewire, but not both at the same time. Small driver files downloaded from Phonic’s website installed with no problems and are easy to configure. I used Presonus’ Studio One software to try a full 16-channel recording and couldn’t fault the results. The Summit’s preamps are very quiet, even when driven hard, and have a useful, crisp response in the top end. A software switch on each channel opens a return signal from your DAW (providing you’ve configured the Phonic driver I/Os in the DAW) and all the DSP in the Summit is available for a hands-on mixdown. Note that the Summit doesn’t become a true control surface – the faders won’t obey any automation from the DAW for example. The AES/EBU and wordclock connections are both in and out, and separate XLR outputs for control room monitoring are there. A menu page called Control Room lets you fine-tune things.
Aside from the fact that Phonic doesn’t have any accompanying DAW software of its own, the Summit is a damned good solution for any small studio. Simply, you won’t need anything else unless you’re into top-shelf preamps or compressors and the AES/EBU input can cover that. The multi-outs can be configured for headphone mixes or running external effects. You’ll go a long way before you run out of options.
The only other grief the Summit caused is that phantom power for the channels comes in banks of four and the dip-switches for each can’t be operated without something small like the tip of a biro.
VIEW FROM THE TOP
In the end I’ve decided the Phonic Summit Digital Console comes close to delivering on its promises and is impressive enough to overlook the disappointments, except perhaps that dodgy data wheel and definitely the fact that losing power loses everything. An SD Card slot allows for external backup of your settings and incidentally is how you update the firmware. The desk is well featured and versatile, particularly with the expansion card fitted. The long boot-up period can be allowed for and I’ll just close my eyes until the main cartoon menu screen goes away. My only real word of warning is for people who consider the Summit for their first foray into digital consoles with virtual routing and touchscreen control. You’ll need a bit more patience than you think, but in the end it’ll be worth it. And don’t forget, the Summit looks cool. Just standing next to it will help you appear expert.
