Steve Levine has been using his new Audient ASP880 to mix the live tracks from his Assembly Point Sessions recorded at Liverpool International Music Festival last month, which featured live performances by Boy George, Mark King, Bernard Butler, Tim Burgess, Hollie Cook, Mary Epworth, and Natalie McCool, as well as Levine himself demonstrating a live recording session.

“I used ASP880 on drums for the pre-production for the real-time session, and I’m now mixing the live tracks for the video with the Audient unit. One of the reasons I chose the ASP880 was because of the digital inserts,” he explains. “I’m using it as a way of adding eight analogue outboard legacy effects such as the H3000 (which bands really love) or my AMS Phaser, both when recording and mixing. I can just plug them into the ASP880’s inserts and they come into my desk digitally. It’s as simple as that.

“As I have a rather large patchbay, I liked the idea that the AD-DAs are on D-subs. I have one or two legacy synthesisers and in order to start fiddling around with those, I can just use the ASP880 as a stand-alone converter and patch them in digitally.

“Another great thing about the Audient is that it gives me eight more high quality mic inputs via ADAT, allowing me to increase the number of inputs I have available – in addition to my console – which is useful for those big sessions.”

Levine has also been taking advantage of ASP880’s other features. “The variable high pass filter on the ASP880 is very handy for me, as I have the Audio-Technica 5040 mic which doesn’t have that option.” The variable impedance is another feature Levine appreciates. “I’m a big fan of the Audio-Technica ribbon mics and I like the fact that with the ASP880 you can flip the impedance and change the character of the mics. This is particularly noticeable for example on guitar cabinets. You can make it a duller tone or a brighter tone, which if you’re doing an overdub gives you an additional feature.

“The feature set is just great. There are a couple of additional features on the ASP880 that made it the better unit in terms of what I needed. I’ve used the DI inputs on the front and those sound great; they’re good at isolating noisy synthesisers because the grounding is good. I’ve got quite a lot of DIs and I think these are as good as anything else I’ve got.”

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