Allen & Heath ZED-10 Four Mono Mic/Lines with 2 Active D.I. and 3 Stereo Line Inputs

Built by Allen & Heath, ZED-10 is an amazing little desk for small band mixing. It is ultra portable for carrying to the gig, and can be used for recording live or in the studio. Guitars can be plugged in directly to the mixer using the specially designed high-impedance inputs, while the mixer has two stereo inputs for MP3/CD players or keyboards. Equipped with professional XLR stereo outputs and a flexible monitoring section with headphone and speaker feed outputs. ZED-10 is bundled with IK Multimedia's AmpliTube X-GEAR software, giving access to superbly modeled amps and effects. Allen & Heath is known for building high quality mixers for the last 40 years. At any time of day or night, across the globe, there is an Allen & Heath mixer out there working hard, sounding great and making life a little easier for the person at the controls. Back in the early 1970s Allen & Heath hand-built consoles in a tiny factory in London for elite bands like Pink Floyd and The Who. These days Allen & Heath customers are spread across almost every environment imaginable, including touring, theatres, churches, nightclubs, TV and radio stations, recording studios and countless other places where great sound matters.

Key Features

USB Audio Flexibility

Getting audio to and from a computer easily is now a common requirement for live sound and music production. The way this has been implemented on ZED is super-flexible and super-easy--no longer do you need to fiddle around the back of your PC to get to the soundcard inputs, only to find that the levels are all wrong and noisy. Just plug in a USB lead to your ZED, select the USB routing on the mixer and the device on your computer and you can move CD-quality audio to and from your PC or Mac. Switches and connection through jack socket terminals provide different send/return configurations.

Send Options:

1. Main Mix Left Right (Post master Level)
2. Aux FX bus (Aux is a pre-fade send, FX is a post-fade send)
3. Record Bus Left Right (Separate stereo bus to Main Mix)

Return Options:

1. To Playback input (through jack socket break contacts)
2. To Stereo 2 channel (through jack socket break contacts)

MusiQ

ZED-10 features a responsive 3-band, swept mid frequency EQ design which utilizes MusiQ--with optimized slope (or Q factor) for equalizing individual instruments.

Guitar DI

ZED-10's pre-amps are similar in design to Allen & Heath's MixWizard range of mixers, but with a twist. Inputs 3 and 4 have a high impedance jack input capable of taking either a normal line level or a low level input from a guitar pickup. These newly designed inputs have been crafted with the aim of replicating the sound of a classic guitar or instrument tube pre-amp in a combo or head amp. An extremely high input impedance ensures loading on pick-ups is minimal and a Class A FET (field effect transistor) circuit powered from 48V is employed to give the valve-like gain stage. There is a gain "Boost" switch associated with the guitar inputs which boosts gain by 26dB to cater for instruments with very low level outputs and the overdrive characteristics of the guitar inputs are very similar to a valve (tube) circuit, being asymmetric and soft. All this makes for a wonderfully natural sound to be reproduced from the instrument, full of warmth and character.

AmpliTube X-GEAR

As if guitarists weren't spoiled enough with its Class A FET high impedance preamps, the ZED-10 comes with access to a full version of IK Multimedia's AmpliTube X-GEAR software--the first fully modular, customizable and expandable preamp and FX modeling software system. All the ingredients are there for some truly legendary guitar and bass tones.