Avid Venue S6L: unprecedented power and performance

With its unprecedented processing capacity (over 300 channels), the S6L meets the highest demands of live sound.

Venue has long been one of the most trusted and desired live mixing systems in the world, a tradition that continues with the new Venue S6L, introduced at NAB 2015 by Avid.

After the appearance of the S3L-X a few months ago, Avid has decided to renew the range of large format systems such as the D-Show and Profile with a system at the technological forefront and with features at the level of what the market demands.

As with its predecessor, the S3L-X, the S6L features an HDX card-based processing engine with 32-bit floating point and 64-bit floating point processing mixed in.

The S6L supports Dante, MADI, Thunderbolt and other emerging technologies to ensure compatibility with a wide variety of Avid and non-Avid products, so you can easily plug the S6L into any new or existing installation.

Like all Venue systems, the S6L features industry-standard plug-ins and Pro Tools integration, but with more tracks and processing power than ever before. In addition, it will be possible to use Waves Plugins in DSP format as Waves and Avid have announced that the Soundgrid processing system will be integrated into the S6L.

The S6L system is a modular system, we can configure different systems with different combinations of control surface and processing unit (Engine).

Control surfaces

As for control surfaces, you can choose three different ones, the S6L-32D with 32 faders and 4 touch screens, the S6L-24D with 24 faders and 3 touch screens and finally the S6L-24 with 24 faders and 1 touch screen.

Regarding the processing unit, we find two different models, the E6L-192 with the capacity to process 192 input channels and 96 mix + LCR buses and the E6L-144 with the capacity for 144 input channels and 64 mix + LCR buses.

All E6Ls incorporate local audio inputs and outputs, AVB Ethernet ports for connection to the Stage as well as free slots for DSP-HDX expansion cards.

To the E6L we can add additional expansion cards such as the MADI-192 card that provides bi-directional MADI over BNC connectors, the BT-192 Thunderbolt card that offers high channel count recording and playback from compatible Pro Tools systems, and the aforementioned HDX-192 DSP expansion cards that offer additional processing power to run AAX DSP plug-ins.

The third element of the system is the Stage64, a fully modular stage rack with 64 inputs and 32 outputs, incorporating AVB over copper and fiber as well as a MADI output.

In an S6L system you can have several Stage64 whose inputs and outputs can be shared with two or more, all of them with automatic gain control to greatly facilitate FOH, monitor and recording configurations for example without having to go through expensive and delicate analog spliters. It is also possible to add an optional DNT-192 Dante card that offers 16 Dante network audio channels, configurable as 16×0, 8×8 or 0×16; compatible with 48/96/192 kHz and redundant network connections.

Finally, the fourth component of the system, the Venue software, will have a new modern, high-visibility look. And because it uses the same Venue software as all Venue live sound systems, mixing engineers will feel at ease and can start mixing with maximum efficiency. Additionally, Venue show files created with previous systems can be used with S6L, significantly minimizing installation time.