Allen & Heath ZED-18

Good Basic Mixer

Had this for a while now, and it's been trouble free and very capable. The EQ is good, and having four AUX sends is helpful. The only thing that I don't like about it is the price for the rack ears.

Ledgendary name and build quality for a bargain price

This is a great mixer, designed for live work and aimed directly at the working band.

It has enough channel inputs to handle a four or five piece band, including mic-ing up the drums and is simple enough to use on the fly if you don't have a dedicated sound engineer (our drummer has the desk next to him at gigs). The build quality is very, very good at this price point - all of the knobs and sliders are mounted on the casing, not on the circut boards, which makes this a very robust piece of equipment. I've done over 100 gigs with this without a single problem.

Feature wise, I would have liked to be able to select phantom power to individual channels rather than all channels on or all off, but at this price I was happy to compromise and to be honest, it hasn't been as big an issue as I thought it would be.

If you want a well built, easy to use, inexpensive mixer for your band, buy one of these. They're great!

Sturdy and straightforward

I was looking for a small reasonably priced studio mixer but budget and space meant I had to compromise. This mixer, while not having direct outs, fulfilled my list of criteria in all other ways - number of channels, auxiliary flexibility and footprint. Allen and Heath's build quality was, of course, not in question.

I circumvented the direct out problem easily by employing a patchbay and insert leads - of course I can't use the channel eq except for monitoring/foldback (not an issue in DAW recording). The usb in out is useful although there is some latency. Generally, a great mixer for a very reasonable price.