SoundCraft SI Expression 1 Digital Mixer - NO MIDI CC

[Chris Bakos]

This is just a warning to all Qlab users who are thinking about buying a SoundCraft Si Expression 1-3. While these boards are as solid as they come, the MIDI spec is a bit lacking. I just discovered that this board is only capable of MIDI Program Changes (triggering built in Scenes)  and will not respond to MIDI Control Changes (control over specific attributes of the board, namely the channel mute). This makes using this board in a musical theater application almost unusable. Now it will mute channels but only if they are part of a Scene in the board, meaning that a musical that would normally have 200 Control Changes and 100 Scenes, now must have 200-300 scenes to do the same work (depending on the complexity of the show) or more! Yikes!

Again, this is not to say that SoundCraft boards are not good. They are quite nice. This is just meant to be a word of warning to those looking to purchase this board, knowing it has onboard MIDI and just figuring that it will do Control Changes like the Yamaha boards will.