AMS NEVE LIBRA LIVE Consoles

[Pierre Dubois]

AMS NEVE LIBRA LIVE Consoles
Can anyone provide me with Libra Live user contact information please?
We have 4 AMS NEVE Libra Live consoles, which we would like to sell (or strip down for spare parts to existing users. (or sell the
complete console for an awesome low price!)
I would like to contact these users and provide them specific
information about the consoles.
Among the parts are complete MIOS racks in perfect shape.
These I/O units can be used on practically all AMS Neve consoles.
The price of the complete console is already worth the MIOS racks alone!

thx for the feedback

[Orlamuender]

Hello I am searching for spare parts for my Libra, especially for ESP Processor Cards, have you got some for sale? Or some more Hardware?

[drystone wall]

Originally Posted by Pierre Dubois

Can anyone provide me with Libra Live user contact information please?
We have 4 AMS NEVE Libra Live consoles, which we would like to sell (or strip down for spare parts to existing users. (or sell the
complete console for an awesome low price!)
I would like to contact these users and provide them specific
information about the consoles.
Among the parts are complete MIOS racks in perfect shape.
These I/O units can be used on practically all AMS Neve consoles.
The price of the complete console is already worth the MIOS racks alone!

thx for the feedback

Begium? RTF?

Not surprised you want rid of your embarissment. A lot want to do the same. And some have tried to sue (Global TV, Sydney) but AMS Neve folded and changed their name (2005) they dropped the PLC and called themselves a LTD company. How's that for timing? So the company ceased to exist, but started up the next day as Ams Neve "Ltd" Bet there was a lot of unhappy creditors who had to be content on either taking 20p in the pound or failing to get paid at all!

It was a time when broadcasters wanted to get into "digital". SSL in the form of the "Aysis" (Aysis Air) and Ams "neve" with Libra (Live - do you get the picture?) wanted to get onto the bandwagon too. Problem was, could they deliver? No!

When you talk to AMS Neve they are NOT "Neve". AMS Neve has been trading on the "Neve" brand for years (Rupert Neve wanted to buy the brand back, but Mark Crabtree refused - and who could blame him, having kept things going purely on a brand ideal).

The digital back end of the ams neve product is loosely based upon the Capricorn. Nothing wrong with that the "purists" will say, but technology has moved on - a long way on!

Sure, Ams Neve (and it's representatives) claim the success of the DFC - but ALL resources go to sustaining that product. It is STILL based upon past technology with the SAME backend. Difference is that more of the bugs have been sorted. Their broadcast product has been DUMPED because the BACKEND cannot sustain it!

[electricc]

dear Pierre,
I'm Fabio from italy and I searching for an Neve Capricorn....
you have some possibility to help me ...??
thank in advanced....
Fabio

[Dynodenny]

Hey DW. A fair amount of venom in your comments. Regardless of name and/or the morality of a business doing a phoenix from difficult economic circumstances the issue should be the quality or not of the product. I feel I need to add a dissenting view.

Your comments regarding the DFC are interesting. When Siemans merged AMS and Neve together they had a problem as both were producing digital desks that had zero common technology. The Logic series of consoles were simple to use, stable and flexible in regard to sample rates, pull downs and so forth. These desks had very advanced digital technology but were a bit weak in regard to analogue. They suffered from having expensive hardware, so users needed to engineer around weaknesses created by conservative purchasing rather than inherent issues with the products.

The Capricorn had a rather limited and simple digital platform. But, oh my the analogue side was great. The Capricorn held some level of respect in the music industry, but was not really economical to build and had real operational issues in the digital chain. So the question was, whose technology would dominate after the merger? It made sense to bolt the analogue front end of the Capricorn on a Logic and get the best of both worlds and that is indeed what the first Libra’s were. I frankly loved the sound of mine but the Frankenstein arrangement was doomed from the start. The biggest problem was that the Neve converters could not deal with anything other the absolute 44.1 or 48k. So the desks were useless in any picture context where 44.056 and other variations are commonplace. (Skywalker had what looked to me to be a Capricorn surface on two Logic backend towers, I assume to overcome these issues). So it was not long before all of the Neve technology made way for the tried and basically reliable Logic platform. Your comments about the products coming out of Neve development are a bit wide of the mark.

The DFC was a development of a Logic 2 that was intended to overcome some operational shortcoming that prevented the Logic being as friendly for film mixing as users such as myself would have liked. We installed a Logic 2 into a film mix room in 1995 with considerable success. But in 1998 the DFC variant became the first fully viable digital film mix console anybody was making and facilities, including ours, bought like ‘em like belladonna at a bikers convention. In essence the DFC is just a Logic 2 with a different Tran base. In the back it is pretty much the same, save for the Encore automation. Encore did appear on a few Logic consoles including the desks at Decca and Air, but it was not until the Libra and DFC did the encore become the standard. By the late 1990’s the backend of all AMS desks was the same hardware with just different surfaces. In fact our last DFC was really just a new surface that we bolted onto our Libra tower. So development of the DFC did not hinder development of the Libra. Quite the opposite. We actually took a really early Logic 2 backend (with horizontal SSP’s that we bought for spares) and put a desk together with that Libra Front end left over from the DFC upgrade. It worked fine. The platforms are all the same and develop in concert.

You comment that AMS wanted to jump on the bandwagon that was being led by the SSL ‘A’ platform for Live. The Libra Live predates the A platform by a number of years. NBC replaced their 4 and 6k’s with Libra lives because there was no digital SSL product available, thus ending (or pausing) their long association with Oxfordshire. As I recall the first Libra Live console went to the David Letterman theatre. The installation specification called for a Mackie analogue console running in parallel as a fail-safe measure; as this would be the first live to air application of any digital console. I seem to recall that the Macke was decommissioned not long after once confidence in a digital platform was established. So I think that SSL followed Burnley into that market.

I am an end user. I have no relationship with AMS other then I like the gear and keep buying it. I Love our three DFC’s, the Libra and all my old Logic 2 and 3’s. The technology moves forward and maintains a sonic edge over every other digital product I use. I have owned many SSL’s as well, and am making an album right now on an old 4K G and am loving it. But digitally SSL just has not been able to compete in my view. (Although I like the SSL 300. Not because of the sound but the workflow is great).

I know a some users have suffered engineering nightmares with AMS. No argument there. But we have accepted that when you commit to leading edge developing technology you either get in early to influence development and be prepared to put in some late nights, or wait until the product is no longer in development and enjoy the stability that comes with waiting. Can eager engineers desperate to get their hands on the latest technology understand this before they send a purchase order?

Buying an AMS digital desk is a bit like buying a customer formula 1 car. You can’t expect to just jump in and drive it. You have to engineer it to your specific needs and driving style and keep doing so. If you do it well you will have a machine that will out perform anything else there is. If however you simply want to go to the shops to buy some tea, perhaps a Mini is more what you need. I understand they build those on Oxford as well.

Dyno

[Roland]

Are you saying if you were in the market for a digital console now, you would consider a Neve?

Regards


Roland

[Dynodenny]

Yes. With consideration of the application. If I was building another film dubbing room a DFC would be my first choice. If I was doing a live music room and was committed to digital, yes. If I was doing a simple TV post room then perhaps not.

Dyno
London

[huub]

'kay.. well, I won't join the discussion, only will say what I think:
Libra live's are unreliable pieces of shit...
No broadcaster in the world is still using em.. NBC isn't, we aren't, noone is..
But anyway, have fun with yours :)

[Remoteness]

Originally Posted by huub

'kay.. well, I won't join the discussion, only will say what I think:
Libra live's are unreliable pieces of shit...
No broadcaster in the world is still using em.. NBC isn't, we aren't, noone is..
But anyway, have fun with yours :)

I hear you and feel you, but believe it or not (for good or for bad) there is one NYC TV News broadcaster that still uses the Libra Live on there programs.

[HughH]

Hello,
Well, I don't usually comment on folks' choice of gear - everyone has their personal choices and level of annoyance.
However this topic is amusing to me. A certain NY broadcasting company had Libra Live desks in their trucks for years. They have replaced (all of them? I think) with Vista8s. Every single television mixer I work with has worked on those desks, every single one of them has had numerous crashes. Some required rebooting, some were long term, requiring factory assistance. The desks earned the nickname "Libra Undead". I've seen a couple of shows with Mackie digital consoles on top of the Libra because of the mixer's past experiences.

If you have had good luck with your Libras, congratulations. I don't disparage your choice of using something that sounds good and may have the functionality you need. However the desks do not have a good reputation among TV mixers for their consistently bad reliability.

My useless opinions (observed)
H

[huub]

crashes, loss of sound, random bursts of noise, random rerouting of the left or right of a stereo fader to random outputs (and rebooting did not help, the setting became corrupt and was for ever unusable, happened on several occasions)... Really nice compressors, limiters and eq though.. I have to admit!

[Remoteness]

That's true, the Crapicorn and Libra Undead have excellent sounding signal (EQ, comps) processors.

It's too bad the consoles are not more reliable.

[Jim vanBergen]

All Mobile Video has replaced almost all their Libre Live's finally, except for the one Libre Live II on Crossroads. It still functions. "Resolution" still has the Oxford in it! Don't know which of those will be replaced first!

Of course, the Neve 55 series in the 50' "Straight" truck and the Harrison in "Stubby" were replaced with Midas Legend consoles, not a great broadcast desk but a solid preamp and EQ and certainly workable.

Some of the middle-end trucks have Amek Recalls (Barney) or ancient but running the Neve BTC in "Endurance".

I'm very happy with the Vista 8's on "Celebrity" and "Titan"!

[jf_uk]

Hopefully not too unrelated..

I bought two Logic 2 + Audiofile SC32 systems from a production company which couldn't make ends meet not too long ago. I sold my Audient ASP 8024-36 and a Radar II to make way for them. I have crashed them many times out of tinkering and curiosity, but eventually learned a few of the bugs and just avoided such. I am of the school who think 96k is just next year's model and doesn't get you there much faster or in more comfort than last decades'. But my my my. Putting a clean source through just a stereo channel, with a basic stack of eq etc, of a favourite classical recording which sits at "near all 0's" a lot of the time gave me goose pimples after playing with the famous (as described by many in feature houses) impossible eq's. I'm only running it at 44.1 too. Even these old Motorola DSP's, now long discontinued, in their dozens, make any Protools or other web-surfing word-processor based system creep toward mp3 players. (ooh, the offence caused.) It is only after you have the chance to truly try your hands at world class audio paths from the best of analogue and digital that the difference can be understood sonically. But the magic of the research which went into the AMS backend systems, even for little details: function DSPs' are used to control the audio DSP's at a 1:3 ratio for generating coefficients on the fly involved in simply fading an audio signal for instance; This is where there is no comparison with new desktop based systems. They're just different beasts. There simply isn't the processing power for the money to do true and correct digital audio manipulation. eg: a lot of manufacturers use look-up tables for the math involved in gain, summing, multiple channel mixing, and the end multiples of many sources are not the same as if done in real-time, by dedicated hardware reading the stream and acting on each in turn, measured with all involved prior to generating the result. Hence the "flat" term given to a lot of digital audio systems.

In the day where so much of our work ends up compressed with 'lossy' formats, broadcast over 'lossy' multiplexes for DVB-T or -S, and copied and traded as cheap commodities, most younger folks these days have no idea what real serious "big format" quality really is/was? about. A lot of it is scrapped for workstations, and what's left is in busy production houses only used on serious clients, or in esoteric folks' garages and basements as objects of pride. -but sadly not on widely distributed great recordings-

I think all of these older desks should be put to work on good recordings, demonstrating that they still are very much today something to reckon with as when they were introduced. I'm not really trying to toot my own horn, but rather admire the other folks dotted around the world who have managed to get ahold of the last generation AMS/Neve systems for personal enjoyment, and tout their stories and defence-of here. Top class.

sore fingers after that ramble.

[Roland]

If you are talking about large format analogue consoles, that they have a sound of their own is irrefutable, however you certainly loose more sound through them than a good digital system, hardly surprising if you look at the amount of electronics is a large format Neve, SSL, etc.

Now if we are getting into digital desks most of them are feeble in terms of computing power, there is one well known board that I saw advertised recently with the bonus of having a new "386" computer board factory fitted!

The Neve may have had good eq and compressor designs, but for several years it has been the Studer digital consoles sound quality that I have heard people rave about, having used the Vista 8 on a few occasions I can personally vouch for it's superb sonic credentials (albeit at a price). I own a Sony DMX which is surprisingly good considering it's budget, and design wise, ahead of it's time.

Often, these days I am working inside my Pyramix system and finding little reason to go external, both the quality of the processing and plugin's available, particularly with the new masscore processing which has made ridiculous amounts of DSP available for processing. Yes it is a little slower than hands on grab a console knob, however, in my situation that isn't really a problem.

Regards


Roland