After multiple online teasers, today Behringer have revealed Wing, a new digital mixer which, if it shakes up the market as much as its predecessor, the X32 did promises to be a very significant product. While the details aren’t yet announced, in a video over at the Musictribe community site there is enough information for us to draw at least some conclusions.
Quote from Uli Behringer On LinkedIn
“A big hug to all our amazing customers for supporting us in the past 30 years and congratulations to our German Innovation team for delivering this wonderful console and all other teams who have contributed in such an amazing manner. I couldn't be more proud of you. Best of all, we'll start shipping from our factory next month.”
What We Know About The Behringer Wing
24 motorised 100mm faders in 3 separate, configurable sections
Large, adjustable angle touch screen
8 on-board 8 Midas PRO mix preamps and Midas PRO outputs
SuperMAC, AES50, Dante and SoundGrid connectivity
144 inputs and outputs via 3 AES50/superMAC ports
4 main, 8 matrix and 16 aux stereo buses with dual inserts, 8-band EQ, dynamics and stereo imager
8 true-stereo premium effect processors with TC, Lexicon, Quantex and EMT emulations.
8 true-stereo standard effect processors.
5 plugin slots on all 40 stereo input channels
FX insert slot and 4 band parametric EQ on all 8 stereo aux channels
Channel Editing via touch-sensitive section with dedicated colour TFT and 11 rotary controls
64 track Dual SD card multitrack recorder
Optional 64x64 Dante/AES67 or SoundGrid card
Additional 4 channel control section with rotary controls, buttons and permanent access to main, matrix or ‘money’ channels
16 latching or momentary buttons and 4 rotary controls that can be configured for ‘preferred functions’
HUI and Mackie Control
2 ethernet ports with integrated switch for networked remote control
Expansion port for optional audio interface cards or digital networking bridges including MADI and ADAT/WC
48x48 USB 2.0 audio interface
StageCONNECT 32-channel low latency interface for personal monitoring or analogue IO boxes
AES/EBU IO on XLRs
8x8 TRS 1/4” line inputs and outputs
2x headphone outputs
MIDI IO
4 GPIO ports
3-year warranty program
Price TBA - rumours circulating that it will be $3499
Paul Vannatto who is a Volunteer Moderator on the Behringer community forum has answered a number of queries. Although his exact position isn’t clear he does seem to have inside knowledge and Behringer seem to be happy with him answering users questions on their forum. On the Wing thread, Paul said…
You can use all existing X32/M32 compatible stageboxes. But there are 3 AES50 ports, meaning you may need more stageboxes...
Answering a query asking if the sample rate used is 96K, Paul said…
“No. 44K and 48K. AES50 at 96 kHz cuts the channel count in half. Many of us prefer the larger channel count to the higher clock rate. Of course they could have gone to a different protocol. But that would mean that the investment in the stageboxes, etc. would be made obsolete.
With regard to whether the optional cards (Dante, Madi etc..) are interchangeable with the X - M series, Volunteer Moderator, Paul answered…
“No they are not”
On the issue of integration with Turbosound IQ and or P16, using an Ultranet connector Paul replied…
“You can do that from the stageboxes.It also will work with the new Hub4/DP48 personal mixers via AES50”
Answering a query about stereo inputs, and how you get a stereo signal to one channel from a stagebox, Paul responded…
“The mono, stereo, mid/side is actually configured on the respective routing page (eg. AES50 A). Each input is by default mono. If you want stereo pair, you would select the desired input and choose stereo and it will stereo link odd/even inputs (similar to what we use to on the X32 channel strips). The mid/side does the same (mid=odd, side=even). Then when you select an input for a channel strip, it will automatically assign the one or two inputs to that strip.”
When Paul was asked if the Wing has a fan and how noisy the faders are relative to the x32\m32 faders. His reply was…
“Yes, it is fanless - quiet as a mouse in a trap.”
More To follow…