RAINDIRK Series 3 Mixing Console

Raindirk Series 3 Group, Master and Monitor modules

Sales price

This console was in Gary Brooker's private studio for over 20 years. Reserved

Late 70's console, the same model that Olympic chose to replace their Helios consoles. The Series 3 has an open sound and has a good reputation as a track laying and mixing console. Raindirk consoles were all designed by Cyril Jones who owned the company, over many years Cyril has produced some great consoles. Cyril is still providing service, repair and modifications for the consoles he built previously.

The Series 3 is a split style console with 26 Mic/Line input channels with switchable direct outputs, 8 groups routable to 24 outputs, 24 monitor inputs plus 12 effects returns - total 62 inputs. The series 3 has a high quality low noise mic amp using a quality microphone transformer. The input channels and effects returns are fitted with 3 band eq. which provides very musical equalisation. The meter bridge houses 24 VU meters to monitor the multitrack machine sends and returns plus 2 large VUs and an RTW meter on the stereo bus, there are also phase and aux meters.

Being a split 70's style desk it operates differently than modern In Line consoles and later Split Mode consoles. When this desk was manufactured the monitor bus and the remix bus were completely separate, whilst track laying the engineer would listen to the group/tape monitor section via the control room speakers, then when it came time to mix the desk was switched to Remix mode. In Remix mode the control room monitors were taken off the monitor section and were used to listen to the stereo bus also the input channels would be routed to the stereo bus - in remix mode the monitor section was redundant.

Dimensions 249 cm long 99 cm deep & 92 cm to the top of the meter bridge

Around 1980 some bright spark suggested combining the Monitor & Remix busses which resulted in all the inputs being available to the engineer at all times which meant that a 32 channel mixer with 24 monitor inputs could use all 56 inputs during remix, before the mod the maximum number of inputs available in remix was 32. Brilliant.