Crest Audio

The Crest Audio VS1500 is serious old school amplification! At https://epicure.club we have a VS1100 and a VS1500. We love them both. The VS1100 is running our tops, which is overkill. The VS 1500 is running our 4 Ohm subs. These amps are very heavy, with big power supplies. You won't want to use them for mobile applications. As installation amps they are great. They sound very good, drive the bass bins without effort and reliably do their job day in and day out. Be aware that these amps have cooling fans, which make them unsuitable for a living room. We don't need another one, but we would be happy to get a second 220 Volt unit with Speakon connectors. Nice examples are getting difficult to find... They don't make them like this anymore!

- The original version of the XR-20 "XRack", manufactured by Crest, is superior to the latter Peavey owned era model. - It sums VERY clean. - It has a pretty good sound. Perhaps Midas Venice 320 league but better low end, more solid and defined. - Mind that these are OLD now (in 2020) so probably it will have old capacitors. I had to fully recap mine and it was 4 days x 8 hours work, but the results were brilliant. - EQ is good, useful. Cool frequency bands, low distortion. Better than Midas equivalent by far. - The HP filter is very well chosen, it is silent and sounds good. Everything is pretty good in this mixer really! The XR20 has a sound very close to a big console. Punchy, great transient, good headroom, great highs, and quite transparent summing. It is a great submixer for drums. It takes saturation very well without losing low end, and produces clean punchy mixes. Plus it is great also to perform in the studio, layout is great. The thing is that the designers went for a minimum phase shift between channels, and achieved a good low end integrity. Solid! I cannot think of other equivalent mixer or even close, and I have tried all classic options (Soundcraft, Midas, Ramsa, Mackies, etc.). This one is the very best! I have it paired with a D&R Dayner (my main console) to handle all my drum duties and some effects, and it kicks ass. The original model XR20 is the same like current APB DYNASONICS "ProRack". APB was indeed founded by the members of the Crest design group who developed the XR-20. They decided to split and continued developing their concept a APB, adding a variable HPF to what already was a good design. I spent only 150 euro for my XR20, but then I had to spend another 180 euro in capacitors, plus a LOT of work. But hey, there is something to going the hard route, right? Now I have a unique sounding piece that I helped to bring to life in 2020, with audio-grade capacitors in it.

The Crest Audio XR-24 is a rack mountable analog mixer. It's got eight mono channels and eight stereo channels, totaling to 24. The picture above is not of the XR-24 I don't believe, as that one only has four stereo channels (and 20 in total) and without a doubt the XR-24 has eight mono and eight stereo channels. The mono channels have 1/4" connections for inputs and outputs as well as XLR inputs, while the eight stereo channels have 1/4" connections as well as XLR ones. There are also a bunch of auxiliary 1/4" and XLR connections, in addition monitoring connections. Check out the full specifications if you're interested in knowing all the details about it's make up, as it would take a bit too long to mention it all here. Suffice it to say that it has all the bells and whistles that you'd expect from an analog mixer. I'm not sure how many spaces it will take up in a rack space, as in some cases it will take up your whole rack. UTILIZATION If you're familiar with the configuration of analog mixers in general, the Crest Audio XR-24 will be easy enough for you to figure out. The equalizers are parametric and simple while the auxiliary features are again, familiar. This is really just a higher quality version of something like a standard Mackie mixer. Don't expect too many curveballs with the XR-24, but rest assured that it has everything you need. I haven't seen a manual for this mixer. SOUNDS The sound of the Crest Audio XR-24 is quite admirable. While it might not blow you away with a super thick sound or anything like that, it does have a very respectable, pristine sound in general. The preamps are clean enough to be used in the recording studio on a daily basis for when you might need some extra channels beyond your upper echelon stuff like Neves, etc. The equalizers are in the same boat, and there are plenty of aux options to use effects and whatnot. You could of course use this as your only mixer in a smaller studio setting as well. OVERALL OPINION For an analog mixer of this size and type, the Crest Audio XR-24 is really a very good one. It isn't as cheap as those that you'll see from Mackie and other companies, but the extra dough is worth it for the generally cleaner sound that you'd get with the XR-24. Not to mention that it is rack mountable and is perfectly designed for supplemental use in recording studios. While I don't know very much about Crest Audio, the XR-24 is definitely something that I would vouch for.

Church rock / blues / classic rock / Modern rock Don't know. It was already setup in my church. The good is it has plenty of Aux sends (10), and other features which is useful for live performance such as group mute (4). Taking into account that this is a large board (40ch + 5 stereo ch), and for that it's reasonably priced ($6000), the sound could be little cleaner. When you monitor PFL the instrument coming into the board sound's pristine, but when you monitor AFL at monitor send, you can hear some grit, and grain. Very clean acoustic guitar or keyboard will not go out the board the way it came into it. I would not recommend this board for recording (which this board isn't designed for anyways) for this reason. Construction seems good on the outside, but there seems to be some weakness between the channel strips and monitor section. Our board is relatively new (about 2 years), but already one of the monitor send is broken. It's not due to physical abuse because the board never gets moved. The board has plenty of features and you will probably not run out of features to do live sound work with board. It's heavy (150 lbs.) and big so you'll definitely need a truck and good flight case to move this board around. This review was originally published on http://www.musicgearreview.com