100% Failure Rate
//
This was one of the first AHB (Allen & Heath
Burnell) consoles sold to the US market and it had
the unfortunate notoriety of having a 100% failure
rate (it was officially 50% but all four of the
ones we got broke immediately). It was the first
desk that the British manufacturer had farmed out
to another company to be made and it was on of the
most poorly made desk I have ever had. It wasn't
that it was a bad design, it was just badly made.
The company that made the desk for AHB stole the
next design and sold it under their own name Sound
Tracks who went on to become DiGiCo. It's a small
world isn't it.
I had designed a monitor console that I was ready to build when AHB sent me one of the desks for all of the trouble we had had. Like I said earlier, the design was fine, it was the workmanship that was terrible, so I decided to use it as a platform instead of starting from scratch. Here I am starting to dismantle the desk. I completely striped it down, removed the faders and the subgroup buttons and rebuilt it into a our first dedicated monitor console. It had twenty inputs and was capable of 14 mixes when I was finished.
I had designed a monitor console that I was ready to build when AHB sent me one of the desks for all of the trouble we had had. Like I said earlier, the design was fine, it was the workmanship that was terrible, so I decided to use it as a platform instead of starting from scratch. Here I am starting to dismantle the desk. I completely striped it down, removed the faders and the subgroup buttons and rebuilt it into a our first dedicated monitor console. It had twenty inputs and was capable of 14 mixes when I was finished.