We were looking at consoles up to around the £10k mark ish (including snake), so while the PM5D was lovely to look at unfortunately I had to bring myself away (and from pretty much all of the Digico stuff) before I ended up getting a bad case of too much gear lust.

In reality therefore we were looking at the M300, LS9 and the A&H ilive / idr kit. All were good desks, it was nice to play around with them.

The LS9 was nice to see again, but having used both the 16 and 32 in the past a few times I pretty much knew what to expect with them. They're good desks for what they are, but I was really going into it looking at the other desks treating it as a benchmark, so the M300 and the ilive were the ones I was peering at most. Worth bearing in mind that my thoughts here were just based on playing with these consoles and talking to the guys there for around half an hour to an hour or so on each one, so they don't come from actually using them, they're just initial impressions!

First off, the M300. I like it, it seems pretty good value and packs a lot of desk in the space there. What takes up really quite a small footprint really houses some nice features. It also seems pretty easy to grab hold of for a beginner, the EQ buttons have lo, low-mid, etc. marked on the console so if a relative novice wants to roll off the bass it's pretty obvious what one to press. (Personally I prefer just having a full parametric to play with, but for people that'd be a bit freaked out by one this is arguably a good thing.) Of course being a small desk if you're using a fair amount of channels you have to use the layers pretty heavily which may confuse some, and there's no built in LCD labels either which again may be a bit confusing sometimes. On a strange note, everyone there seemed really enthusiastic that the REAC protocol was great because it was all proprietary and locked in-house! Perhaps being an open source guy I just switch off when I hear those things, but I'm not sure that's a particularly great point - I'd prefer a more open protocol that isn't locked down (oh manufacturers, why can't you agree on one standard?!) The REAC protocol does nicely tie in with their personal monitoring systems which are very nice bits of kit and very cleverly done. However, they also seemed pretty pricey and I'm not sure being tied to REAC if you could sensibly use alternative systems should you wish. Overall a nice desk though!

The ilive t112 was the other main one we looked at, it's more expensive than the M300 but still to me seemed like an awful lot of desk for the money - there was a nice touchscreen, good amount of faders, LCD markers on each fader with different backlight colours (nice touch to make channels stand out) and the whole console seemed extremely flexible in terms of how you set it up, which again I like. There's also tons of effects on board, everything I could think I'd need, including stuff I'll admit I'd never heard of (parallel path compression for instance!) A feature I liked about the IDR snake is that it has an expansion card slot where you can add in a hearbus card, ethersound card, or any other kind of card - i.e. it's not locked into one single protocol and can interact with a number of other systems.

OK, so I'm probably starting to sound biased because as much as I liked the M300, I did like the ilive stuff much more! But each to their own, they're both great consoles and have obviously been designed with different things in mind.

Just a few thoughts above there - feel free to jump in and shout me down if anything I've said is wrong. But hope that helps you!