Yesterday (November 7,2021), Solid State Logic quietly introduced the Big Six production mixer.
Nothing posted to email accounts from SSL.

Is a rackmount DSP unit like the Avid Carbon next?
Is $3000 U.S. a fair price for this USB 2.0 device?

Prices in U.S. dollars:
Big Six $2,999.99
UC1 $ 899.99
UF8 $1,399.99

Solid State Logic big Six product page

Article & videos from Pro Tools Expert/Production Expert
SSL Big SiX - New Solid State Logic Console Announced

Article & video from Vintage King
Solid State Logic Expands With BiG SiX Desktop Mixer

 

Last edited: Dec 9, 2021

Not taking away from the individual products. I find it strange how SSL has chosen to segment their new products.

 

Still useless for real work. EQ - is a joke.
Another stagnation "cheap" product from SSL.
For haters - i like Fusion. It's great.

 

50% bandwidth would have made for a more usable EQ section or, at that price point, adding a stacked Frequency/Q pot for all three bands.

 

The USB section could have been used in the UF8 using at the very least USB 3.0 (5 Gbit/s now USB 3.1 Gen 1) or, USB 3.1 (10Gbit/s now USB 3.1 Gen 2). This would allow for enough speed & data bandwidth over a unidirectional bus.

Spoiler: USB 3.0

The USB 3.0 specification is similar to USB 2.0, but with many improvements and an alternative implementation. Earlier USB concepts such as endpoints and the four transfer types (bulk, control, isochronous and interrupt) are preserved but the protocol and electrical interface are different. The specification defines a physically separate channel to carry USB 3.0 traffic. The changes in this specification make improvements in the following areas:

• Transfer speed – USB 3.0 adds a new transfer type called SuperSpeed or SS, 5 Gbit/s (electrically, it is more similar to PCI Express 2.0 and SATA than USB 2.0)[9]
• Increased bandwidth – USB 3.0 uses two unidirectional data paths instead of only one: one to receive data and the other to transmit
• Power management – U0 to U3 link power management states are defined
• Improved bus use – a new feature is added (using packets NRDY and ERDY) to let a device asynchronously notify the host of its readiness, with no need for polling
• Support for rotating media – the bulk protocol is updated with a new feature called Stream Protocol that allows a large number of logical streams within an Endpoint

USB 3.0 has transmission speeds of up to 5 Gbit/s, about ten times faster than USB 2.0 (0.48 Gbit/s) even without considering that USB 3.0 is full duplex whereas USB 2.0 is half duplex. This gives USB 3.0 a potential total bidirectional bandwidth twenty times greater than USB 2.0.[10]

Spoiler: USB 3.1

In January 2013 the USB group announced plans to update USB 3.0 to 10 Gbit/s (1250 MB/s).[54] The group ended up creating a new USB specification, USB 3.1, which was released on 31 July 2013,[55] replacing the USB 3.0 standard. The USB 3.1 specification takes over the existing USB 3.0's SuperSpeed USB transfer rate, also referred to as USB 3.1 Gen 1, and introduces a faster transfer rate called SuperSpeed USB 10 Gbps, referred to as USB 3.1 Gen 2,[56] putting it on par with a single first-generation Thunderbolt channel. The new mode's logo features a caption stylized as SUPERSPEED+.[57] The USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard also reduces line encoding overhead to just 3% by changing the encoding scheme to 128b/132b, with effective data rate of 1,212 MB/s.[58] The first USB 3.1 Gen 2 implementation demonstrated real-world transfer speeds of 7.2 Gbit/s.[59]

The USB 3.1 standard is backward compatible with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0. It defines the following transfer modes:

• USB 3.1 Gen 1 – SuperSpeed, 5 Gbit/s data signaling rate over 1 lane using 8b/10b encoding (effective 500 MB/s); the same as USB 3.0
• USB 3.1 Gen 2 – SuperSpeed+, new 10 Gbit/s data rate over 1 lane using 128b/132b encoding (effective 1212 MB/s)

The nominal data rate in bytes accounts for bit-encoding overhead. The physical SuperSpeed bit rate is 5 Gbit/s. Since transmission of every byte takes 10 bit times, the raw data overhead is 20%, so the byte rate is 500 MB/s, not 625. Similarly, at SS+ rate the encoding is 128b/132b, so transmission of 16 bytes physically takes 16.5 bytes, or 3% overhead. Therefore, the byte-rate at SS+ is 128/132 * 10 Gbit/s = 9.697 GBit/s = 1212 MB/s. In reality the SS bus has some additional service overhead (link management, protocol response, host latencies), so the best-case achievable data rates are about 10% smaller.[citation needed]

This rebranding of USB 3.0 as "USB 3.1 Gen 1" has allowed manufacturers to advertise products with transfer rates of only 5 Gbit/s as "USB 3.1," omitting the generation.[60]

Full USB 3.0 Wikipedia Article

 

Assuming they did it right, anything higher than USB 2 wouldn't have really made a big difference, you should be able to record all of the available I/O with pretty confortable latency at 96Khz as they advertise (should even be able to handle them at 192Khz/24bit). I wouldn't be concerned about that, as long as every other feature lives up to the 3K pricetag.

I think the price is pretty fair for what it is, but in terms of usability...i don't know.

 

they dont sell big ones anymore
so they sell "i got an ssl at my sh*tty unbooked home studio" knockoffs
makes sense from a financial standpoint

 

Not true at all. A studio I do mastering for just purchased a new SSL Origin.

I owned an SSL Six for awhile and thought it sounded excellent for the price. I ultimately sold it because when I track I use a 500 series lunchbox, and when I mix it's ITB.

 

You pay them they will build a full desk money talks.. but it gona cost

 

That is not entirely accurate. The operation of DATA flow using the USB protocol heavily depends on how the driver is coded.
This was an issue with early MIDI drivers until a minimum specification was agreed to.

USB2:
A line of people going through one door to drop off a package & pick up another package. Everyone in line must wait for the person ahead of them complete their sequence before being allowed to go through.

USB3/4, Thunderbolt, Audio Network Protocols:
Two or more lines in both directions simultaneously.

This is also akin to software developers coding for multi-core use rather than just single core.

 

I'm very curious if 3k buys you decent quality. Also that built in sound card screams shitty conversion. With 3k you could buy a rupert neve master bus processor, or alot of lunchbox gear. I myself got a vintage studer mixer clone for a fraction of the price and it has transformers on every of it's 8 channels- I doubt this mixer has any to be frank.

Do people really buy gear purely for the brand? This may sound like a retarded question but I genuinely thought big purchases are well thought through by the customers it attracts ( usually audio nerds)