Given that this Venice console is a fraction of the price of some Midas touring consoles, it is to be expected that some compromises have had to be made, but these are relatively few.
A quiet cooling fan keeps air circulating inside the case. (A 32-channel Venice F is certainly not a single-person lift, so I must thank the Midas guys who drove the review desk down from Kidderminster and carried it into my studio!) The design is extremely stylish, with futuristically sculpted end panels, a curved arm rest and a distinctive colour scheme, which I can best describe as indigo and dusky aubergine, with a sprinkling of suitably colour‑coded knobs. It also seems extremely rugged, with an all‑steel chassis and appropriate internal bracing. It has a fairly steeply raked panel, which gives a good view of the controls and creates plenty of rear panel space to accommodate the connectors - plus a couple of four‑pin lamp connectors for adding lighting.
The Venice uses the latest TC AT Firewire chipset, and it can be used with Mac OS or Windows OS machines. The Firewire connector is the standard large six‑pin type but the user is left to source his or her own Firewire cable, presumably because different computers will require different connectors at the other end. There are rear‑panel LEDs on the digital I/O card to show whether the converters are operating at 48 or 44.1 kHz, as well as to indicate whether it's using the internal clock or an external clock source (an option which presumably exists to support future expansion, as there is no digital I/O on the desk).
Because of the bandwidth requirements associated with streaming 32 channels of audio in both directions, only sample rates of 44.1kHz and 48kHz are supported. Each Venice F model's Firewire audio input and output capability matches its channel count, so the 32‑input desk we had for review can send and receive 32 discrete channels of audio over a basic Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394a) cable. Unbalanced RCA phonos are also provided, for the easy connection of consumer playback devices.
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