New Music Gear Monday: Avid S1 Control Surface

For everyone that’s admired the various Avid S-series control surfaces but felt they were out of reach price-wise, the company just announced it’s new S1, the smallest of all its offerings that looks like it will fit in just right in any small studio environment.

The S1 packs a lot of punch into a small controller, from motorized faders and knobs that respond to your touch, to fast-access touchscreen workflows and soft keys that enable you to perform complex tasks with a single press. It’s powered by EUCON, Avid’s high-speed Ethernet control protocol that not only delivers hardware/software integration, but gives you full touch and tactile access to a host of Avid and third-party software functions and controls. You can even switch between multiple applications (and workstations even) at the touch of a button, providing a fluid editing and mixing experience. 

S1 packs 8 motorized, touch-sensitive, 100 mm long-throw faders: 8 push-top, touch-sensitive rotary encoders; and 8 high-resolution OLED displays, plus multiple status LEDs and multicolor track buttons for channel metering, monitoring, processing, track status, and automation modes. Plus there are assorted hardware buttons/keys for various functions and mode selections, including Mute, Solo, Record-enable, Bank, Nudge, and more.

To take it a step further, S1 acts as a wireless wi-fi connected dock for an iPad to provide channel views when you use the free Pro Tools|Control software. This provides high-res metering that includes gain reduction as well as automation status and EQ, dynamics, and panning curves. On the monitoring side, the new app will offer S6 style monitoring control with a dedicated Monitoring View that will support up to 9.1 surround, where you can quickly assign and control talkback, listen-back, and speaker sources and levels right from the surface to speed up recording and mixing workflows.

And it’s expandable. If you feel like you don’t have enough faders, you can link multiple controllers together as well as the previously released Pro Tools|Dock.

Although the S1 was intended to work with all flavors of Pro Tools, it does work with other DAWs as well. Adobe Audition, Adobe Premiere, Apple Logic Pro and Steinberg Cubase and Nuendo are among the workstations that connect seamlessly.

The Avid S1 is expected to be available near the end of the year, and although the price hasn’t been officially announced yet, it’s rumored to be somewhere around $1,000, although you have to supply your own iPad.

You can find out more here, or watch the video below.

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