Inevitably, some people will flinch at the price, and point out that there are other mixers in the UK market with a roughly similar collection of basic features selling for a lot less — Soundcraft, Mackie, and Behringer all offer such products, for example. However, at the end of the day, with an Allen & Heath mixer you get what you pay for. I'm sure the company could knock a lot off the price of this mixer if they just used one large circuit board for all the channels' circuitry and control knobs, and mounted it parallel with the control surface — that is certainly what some cheaper mixers look like inside. But the WZ316:2 has a separate board for each channel and instead of having the control knobs mounted on the circuit board so that they poke through the mixer's metalwork, all the controls are firmly bolted to the front panel. Any knocks the controls receive will be taken by the metal casing and won't flex the more fragile circuit boards. In fact, wiggling the pots reveals that they have hardly any play compared to circuit-board-fixed pots which tend to flex like joysticks!
It's nice to know that if you decide to keep the mixer for many years, noisy pots and faders can be replaced one channel at a time, rather than having to replace the whole board. In that respect, the 16:2 is best thought of as 16 channel strips plus a master section, and in those terms the asking price doesn't sound unreasonable at all. |
