Recording - January 2010 - 35

Computer integration and other niceties The Helix Board 24 Universal comes with an easily installed driver set that works on Windows XP (Service Pack 1 or better) or Vista (we presume Windows 7 support is on the way if it’s not here yet; at the time of our review Win7 was only just starting to ship). On a Mac with OS X 10.3.5 or later, it appears natively when plugged in and is recognized as an available audio device without driver installation. The Windows version has a handy control panel for setting buffers, latencies, tracking dropouts, and so forth. FireWire and USB 2.0 operations are almost but not quite the same. In FireWire, in addition to the channel inputs and stereo outs, there are two inputs called “17 and 18”, which can be fed by the Mains, Group 1/2, or Aux 3/4 (switch selectable from the mixer’s front panel). In USB 2.0, the mixer acts as a 16-in/2-out interface, and the userassignable channels aren’t available. To get you started, the Helix Board 24 Universal comes with Steinberg Cubase LE 4, which can record up to 8 tracks at a time, but the board will work with any DAW that recognizes Core Audio on the Mac and ASIO on the PC. My tests with Ableton Live 7 and 8, Apple Logic 8 and 9, Rogue Amoeba Nicecast, BIAS Peak Pro 6, i3 DSPQuattro, and other software on my test Mac all were successful, and further tests with Live and Cakewalk SONAR on a PC running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 were equally smooth. The board’s Aux routing is especially flexible, letting you create pre-fader Aux mixes for your tracking room complete with effects, routing Aux 4 to only the Control Room for feedback-free monitoring of a secondary computer signal (very handy for streaming audio), integrating the internal effects or replacing them with an external return, etc.There aren’t very many routing tricks you might think of that can’t be accomplished from the front panel. To my ears the effects processor seems identical to its predecessor, with over 100 presets including reverbs, delays, modulations, pan, tremolo, tap delays, and useful slate tones (100 Hz/1 kHz/10 kHz) and pink noise. While it won’t keep Lexicon or Eventide awake at night, it’s a handy addition with a reasonably clean sound that would work well for tracking-room “confidence” effects and for special seasoning here and there. Final thoughts Two years ago, when I finished my review of the earlier Helix Board, the 24 FireWire MkII, I thought I’d finished my observations on that mixer RECORDING JANUARY 2010 but as it turned out, there was one thing I didn’t get to write about— namely, what happened to my studio after I took the Helix Board out! Trying to restore the functionality that the Helix Board had introduced to my studio was more of a hassle than I can describe here—that mixer had let me do so many cool things without me having to even think about them. For the next several months, my productivity dipped significantly as I tried to work around everything Phonic’s flagship board had let me do so seamlessly and when the Universal version was announced, I jumped at the chance to get it back into my room, and was pleased to see that everything worked as well or better than before, with the addition of its being able to communicate via USB 2.0 as well. And now that this review is over, with the Helix Board 24 Universal receiving an even more enthusiastic thumbs-up than its forebear I am gloomily contemplating life without it. Again. Price: $999.99 MAP More from: Phonic America Corp., www.phonic.com; dist. in USA by American Music & Sound, www.americanmusicandsound.com.
http://www.phonic.com http://www.americanmusicandsound.com http://www.uaudio.com http://www.uaudio.com
Recording - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2010
