It all started (as it tends to) with a searchstring: “Audio Interface XLR Output”.
At some point during 3 decades of peforming with computers/electronics, it dawned on me that the weakest link in any live music signal chain is the onstage output into the house sound infrastructure. For a long time during the early Eurorack years (2008-2012) I’d been traveling around w/ one of those forest-green-steel Radial stereo DI Boxes which, admittedly, sound terrible… and yet I blanket-recommended them to pretty much everyone looking for a same-solution (maybe misdirection, certainly sabotage; never easy to know what was going on re: my brain-chemistries back then, though I’ve softened in my resolve to hinder in the interim by a wide margin).
Then, recently, too many times to count, the balanced outputs of Universal Audio’s Apollo | Solo were swiftly unbalanced; hastily jammed with TS cables then sent into additional DI, which is like putting salt on salt. Some culpability, sure: I never carried around the requisite nonstandard-kit-issue TRS-XLR cable-pair. I never carry around any cables, really (went out to dinner once with Keith Rowe, and after talking Tal Farlow & Barney Kessel for some time we shot straight into the heart of the touring musician’s primary concern: the weight & physical footprint of equipment brought overseas & his hammering into me that cables are the biggest culprit really sunk in; I’ve taken it to heart for 20 years now). Yearning for something to inject directly into stage-boxes, and ruling out say Neural DSP’s Quad Cortex (overkill; essentially a second laptop) there really isn’t much on the market that dwells on this need aside from those corny-ass (Radial, Whirlwind) USB DI bricks.
Everything recording-wise in the early days (1991-2002) came out of a multitrack (Tascam 238, 424, Fostex X-18) or sampler (Kurzweil K2500R, Akai S2800, S3000XL) into the (matching, 828) mixer (came close then to pulling up on a 388, which would in retrospect have been a great aesthetic & stylistic move; some of my all-time favorite music has the unmistakeable signature of this blessed machine, including virtually the entire Twisted Village catalogue) into an (Aiwa HHB; forever locked on 48k) DAT Machine, so the “Mixing As Real-Time Performance” concept has long been baked in. Later, I had a Mackie Onyx for a minute, and aside from the bevy of baked-in issues (crackle central; buffer overruns, lack of reliable limiters in the preamp stage pre-Nyquist) the idea of a physical mixer/fader channel-set that can be piped into with multi-channel audio via a single cable (and not, solely, vice-versa) has always been appealing.
So, at length, it’s a familiar way of thinking about how music is organized & re-arranged in real time; physical interaction with potentiometers shaping music as it progresses in a linear fashion. The mixer-model itself is a control-paradigm that I’m personally comfortable with; if we’re splitting hairs on what constitutes “Performance” within this remit, I’d wager that it’s the best analogue for an “Electronic Instrument” short of the sort of Waiswisz-lineage (I truly deeply loved Michel after spending time w/ him at STEIM in the years before he passed; definitely no slight) gesture-flailing that may look great on grant proposals or NIME/ICMC papers but always makes my skin bubble when encountered out in the wild (like seeing a trapped bird). David Tudor certainly had it right when he built cybernetic-lineage circuits as, essentially, labor-saving devices, thus creating easily some of the most “Expressive” Electronic Music; all of it expressed, in advance, by design.
Which brings us to the Model 12; it cleanly ticks boxes from two wholly separate hypothetical columns. XLR 1/2 outs; check. Physical interaction of 8 separate (6 mono, 2 stereo) streams from digital systems (not necessarily computers; by all reports this works beautifully with standalones such as Akai’s MPC line); check. Rudimentary but present onboard effects; check. Per-channel EQ w/ sweepable band, twin sends, pans, mutes, “One Knob” compressor, assignment to “Alt” 3/4 outputs; all check.
But perhaps most salient of all: while shopping for a replacement for Jetpack’s Prime Backpack (which I’ve enjoyed vastly as a lone “Weekend Warrior” vessel, but alas does not fit my ergonomic needs/form & has resulted in 30+ lbs. of boxy plastic/metal precariously hanging off of a single wounded shoulderblade) I came across Analogue Cases’ Trakpack & nestled deep within the press imagery (the 17th slide, no less) is a glamour shot of the Model 12 so snugly asleep inside, lulled no doubt by the dancing, unmistakeable light-refractions from the contours of its dedicated Decksaver.
I had this pegged, years back, as a “Large Thing” (possibly the Models 16, 24 moreso, but the 12 is less than two inches per dimension larger than an LP record, weighing roughly the same as 20 of them, which is usually what I’m hauling back from the majority of trips anyways) & seeing it comfortably aslumber inside a backpack not much larger than what I’d already been lugging quickly & forcibly shattered my thinking & I instantly skipped the usual more exhaustive reasoning & haggled one (with the bonus carrot of a frayed CS-Model 12 Carrying Bag) down to $400 (or, to put it within a greater context; $70 more than Zoom’s LiveTrak L6, which everyone has been going on & on about & offers so little of of what’s promised here, esp. on the return-voyage side) & pounced on it.
I’ve long been an advocate for not necessarily using the latest & greatest & that this has been on the market for a solid 5 (the SOS review is dated December 2020) means than plenty have had their chance to break bread w/ one of these, make peace, & move on. Early, pre-TB / USB-3 units (RME are famous for never having contemporized beyond this generation of chipsets & guess what? They’re widely regarded as some of the most stable interfaces out there) are often bargains; those $2k+ “Boutique” Lynx/Prism interfaces can be had for a song now & they’re just as effective/great as during their initial marketing phases.