The Allen & Heath ZED-10 is an amazing little desk for small band mixing. It is ultra-portable for carrying to the gig and can be recorded live or in the studio. Guitars can be plugged directly into the mixer using the specially designed high-impedance inputs, while the mixer has two stereo inputs for MP3/CD players or keyboards. It has professional XLR stereo outputs and a flexible monitoring section with headphone and speaker feed outputs. ZED-10 is bundled with IK Multimedia's AmpliTube X-GEAR software, giving access to superbly modeled amps and effects. Allen & Heath has been known for building high-quality mixers for the last 40 plus years. At any time of day or night, across the globe, there is an Allen & Heath mixer out there working hard, sounding great, and making life a little easier for the person at the controls. Back in the early 1970s Allen & Heath hand-built consoles in a tiny factory in London for elite bands like Pink Floyd and The Who. These days Allen & Heath customers are spread across almost every environment imaginable, including touring, theatres, churches, nightclubs, TV and radio stations, recording studios, and countless other places where great sound matters. It is bundled with AmpliTube X-Gear software for access to more amps and effects.
USB Audio Flexibility
Getting audio to and from a computer easily is now a common requirement for live sound and music production. The way this has been implemented on ZED is super-flexible and super-easy - no longer do you need to fiddle around the back of your PC to get to the soundcard inputs, only to find that the levels are all wrong and noisy. Just plug in a USB lead to your ZED, select the USB routing on the mixer and the device on your computer and you can move CD-quality audio to and from your PC or Mac. Switches and connections through jack socket terminals provide different send or return configurations.
MusiQ
ZED-10 features a responsive 3-band, swept mid-frequency EQ design that utilizes MusiQ, with optimized slope (or Q factor) for equalizing individual instruments. It is a high-quality mixer, perfect for places where great sound matters.
Guitar DI
ZED-10's pre-amps are similar in design to Allen & Heath's MixWizard range of mixers but with a twist. Inputs 3 and 4 have a high-impedance jack input capable of taking either a normal line level or a low-level input from a guitar pickup. These newly designed inputs have been crafted to replicate the sound of a classic guitar or instrument tube pre-amp in a combo or head amp. An extremely high input impedance ensures loading on pick-ups is minimal and a Class A FET (field effect transistor) circuit powered from 48V is employed to give the valve-like gain stage. There is a gain ‘Boost’ switch associated with the guitar inputs which boosts gain by 26dB to cater to instruments with very low-level outputs and the overdrive characteristics of the guitar inputs are very similar to a valve (tube) circuit, being asymmetric and soft. All this makes for a wonderfully natural sound to be reproduced from the instrument, full of warmth and character.
AmpliTube X-GEAR
As if guitarists weren't spoiled enough with its Class A FET high impedance preamps, the ZED-10 comes with access to a full version of IK Multimedia's AmpliTube X-GEAR software - the first fully modular, customizable, and expandable preamp and FX modeling software system. All the ingredients are there for some truly legendary guitar and bass tones.