Kids These Days

Look at this. Just look at this thing. Sixteen analog inputs. Fourteen analog outputs. A gazillion more digital. And all for fifteen hundred bucks. Good grief.

I can't even begin to express how important input metering is on channels. Especially for live sound.

The Behringer X32 Producer solves many of life's problems.
When I look back on my time in audio I realize that I've spent a lot of effort trying to get cheap mixers (read: more expensive than $1500) to work for me. Sure, on high-end mixers there were always enough outputs (strangely, inputs is almost never the problem outputs is). And now you can just buy one of these Behringer things and have all the routing you've always needed.
Yup, all the time I'd spent on mixers back in the day where I was frustrated there was at the time a solution. It just wasn't cheap. The solution was several tens of thousands of dollars. And it wasn't 'till nigh on the end of my career that I was working on those mixing boards.

Anybody remember these things?

Looking at this makes me sick to my stomach.

Thinking about that Yamaha PM1000 the New York Shakespeare Festival used to have just makes me shudder. Three generations later with the PM3000 they still couldn't get it to sound good. But everybody specified them in the late 80's early 90's because when you flipped the power switch they turned on. And in the world of pro audio, just getting the thing to turn on was half the battle.
When I was using a PM1000 it was hopelessly out-of-date at the time (Macbeth with Raul Julia if you must know).
While I was there it got replaced with a DDA mixer which was vastly, oh so vastly, better. Sheesh.