Allen & Heath ZED-10 5-stars Reviews

Fantastic Mixer

Got this for the home studio and have been very happy with it. Hard to beat in this price range.

Excellent mixer for podcasting

Love this mixer for podcasting

maximum value for money, good extras

was happy to find out USB connection on it.

fully working, very sturdy and fully-analog device.

i love mine and wont give it away.

Great mixer! Nice sound! Good amp.

Nice quality! Solid!

Highly reccomend!

Great cheap mixer! The sound is quite nice!

It's cheap, it's small, and it does what it says on the tin. BUT... I gotta say, the summing on this thing is suuuuper musical, warm, butter and the channels gel so well. It has this sort of soft, tape-like treatment of transients that's pretty wild. Also it over-drives really nicely. I got myself a Mackie VLZ4 after this thing and I honestly miss the sound of this one, to the point that I'm thinking of going back to the ZED series. The new mixer sounds so sterile compared to this thing.

If you're looking for your first mixer, this should be it.

Great small mixer

I love it and it works and sounds great. The only thing I hate is that the XLR cables connect at the top of the mixer. This makes the cables reach high and if you are using the mixer infront of a screen, those cables might cover the picture. I am sorry I didn't get the SoundCraft one which has the cables coming out of the back of the mixer. But this one sounds great and the EQ knobs are really good.

Excellent small live mix desk

I've been using this desk for the past few months for both individual mixing (mic, keyboard, bass to a personal monitor) and as a live mixer for small ensemble work. Excellent in all respects - build quality, sound, ease of use. If you mix a lot of vocals, you may benefit from a model with some reverb (not available on this model) or an external fx unit with reverb / comp etc.,

Perfect mixer for a home usage. Very stable, nicely built, has a lot of useful features, very intuitive and simple interface.

Great for small bands and acoustic acys

I've had this little beast for a good few years now and it still lives in my car in case my digital iPad only mixer breaks down!

Sound quality and eq section on each channel is spot on, tone for vocals can be dialled in super fast.

The fx and aux sends are great allowing you to add reverb (as the unit doesn't have fx) if you require, and a nice level sent to monitors too.

Overall, great sound, small footprint, reliable, easy to use. What's not to like?!

The best what you can get

I looked for some small versatile mixer to be used with microphones on the drum set. I am usually sceptical when seeing so many positive reviews on item. But I must confirm that ZED-10 deserves for them. I did not heard better sound quality mixer in that range before. Equipped pre amps are absolute top notch and give perfect warm without EQ distortion especially on overhead microphones. This at least is worth the price of the unit. It has 3 range EQ available with possibility to swipe through mid range. Pretty useful for the selectivity within 'most busy" range of every instrument. It has USB port and is compatibly with most of DAW's. There is 2 track recording possible. It's a perfect mixer for the drummer using four microphones (bass,snare,overheads) configuration. It can be used also for small band, thanks to 4 XLR channels. But I would suggest to buy the ZED-10 FX version which has built-in effects.

Unit is very easy and intuitive in use. It's considerably heavy and well built. Unit is powered with typical 3 pin cable. No fancy incompatible power supplies which is a huge plus. There is 48V phantom power available for every channel

Well done Allen & Heath.

Fantastic little mixer

I use this for my keyboard rig with 4 keyboards and a microphone. The USB interface is a great feature. The mixer is so flexible with a built in power supply unit. So good to see balanced outputs for this size of mixer. Good value for money.

the best small mixer

This has got the be the best smaller mixer. For the money it is very well built and sound great . I have a KeyB B3 Hammond & Korg Kronos being mixed to the main desk through this small unit and it is better than all the other mixers I have ever used.

You won't get better at this price

Very felxible and versatile mixer for in situ use (hence no need for faders). Fantastic sound quality and the interface and routing options far exceed what you would think from such a small mixer. Solid build quality, ease of use and the USB connetction means you really won't get better at this price.

A Real Pleasure!

A really solid well made piece of kit. I bought this to replace my Motu 4Pre which although is also solid and has excellent sound, is difficult to physically control. Plus, I'm not a fan of virtual mixing boards. So it was a real pleasure to have tactile controls that feel good to operate. Used for speech and mixing/editing pre-recorded radio pieces it also allows me to attach 3 mics and a broadcast headset for live links to the broadcast studio via a Comrex BRIC-Link. The USB is connected to a MacBook Pro running Mavericks 10.9.4 and worked first time with no subsequent problems. Since gain on mics, for my purpose, is 'fix and forget', the need for sliders, and therefore a larger unit, proved unnecessary. There is also enough amp gain to cleanly power 'cold' mics like an EV20 and SM57 etc. Perfect for people like me who are not sound engineers and want an unobtrusive, intuative mixer on their desks. At the price, it's extremely good value for money.

UPDATE APRIL 2015: Now running on OS x Yosemite v10.10.3 with no problems encountered.

Great small desk for recording and mixing.

I was looking for a small portable desk that would work at home for mixing small recordings and would also be used in small live venues. In the past I have used an Allen & Heath MixWizard 16:2dx but this was too big to cart around all the time and I wanted something small that had similar quality.

I have been using this desk at least once a week since January and this desk fulfilled and surpassed what I needed.

The 4 Mono channels are excellent with a wide range of control, the sound is always very clean . The versatility of the desk is impressive. The multiple outputs and busses mean you can mix and record in multiple ways with a little imagination you can normally find a solution to most requirements. I have also found the documentation excellent the circuit diagrams are particularly useful.

I have not yet used the USB interface as I have generally used my ZOOM h4 for recording to save me carting the Laptop around but I like that fact that this is available.

The one thing I would like to have seen would be for the FX (2nd Aux) channel to be switchable pre/post fade but in something this small you cant have everything!!

Well-thought-out product, an excellent home studio tool

This mixer offers many useful routing/connectivity features and it has become the central part of my home studio. USB connectivity is very helpful (the computer recognizes it as a stereo input and output device) and it is also possible to use the computer as an effect device. Now if the device would offer multi-channel usb audio it would be more than perfect :) The only problem I had was with a strong emanating smell when fresh out of the box (smelled like an electronics factory I guess), but that went away after a couple of days, as also advised by A&H technical support.

Perfect product for this price !

The preamps and 24?bit conversion allow you plenty of headroom and a low noise?floor, and the ease of routing any channel to your computer is welcome. Though the EQ is limited in terms of control, it sounds good, and having everything presented in a single package like this is great. The 48kHz sample?rate limit is perfectly adequate for recording, though it may be a bit of a drag in some situations ? because, even though I don't see the need to record at rates higher than that, it means that you can't play back any 96kHz audio that was recorded elsewhere.

This criticism aside, I have to say that I find it very hard to fault this mixer. In fact, I'd thoroughly recommend the ZED10 FX as the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to get seriously into home recording ? and if you want to take things out on stage, it offers plenty of options for a small band there too. Just add a laptop, mic and speakers, and you're ready to go.