Behringer WING Rack digitalni mikser

WING Rack — made for the way you want to work

Digital mixers are extremely powerful; thus, they can seem intimidating. That’s not the case with the WING Rack. Like its full-blown console predecessor, it’s a breeze to navigate. Its interface centers around a 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen that provides full access to all its functions and parameters — no tablet required. That said, Behringer still provides you with a suite of external remote control software for offline mixing on mobile and desktop. Regardless of how you take command, the WING Rack is completely configurable, enabling you to customize it to the way you want to work.

Sources make navigation simple

The WING Rack takes after its full-size predecessor in that it’s jam-packed with I/O — 374 inputs and outputs, to be exact. And if you include its internal signals, the WING Rack includes 400 inputs and outputs. Faced with this much I/O, Behringer’s engineering team reimagined the flow of a traditional mixer, putting the emphasis on your source audio, using what Behringer calls — quite fittingly — Sources. Within the WING ecosystem, inputs are much more than historical inputs because they contain metadata on what the Source is — tags, input icon, input color, gain, phantom power, and if the Source is mono, stereo, or mid-side. All that information follows the source to any channel. With one button, that information can be copied to the channel, and the tags, icon, color, and other metadata show up on the channel immediately. If you move a Source to another channel, the information goes with it — no need for old-fashioned copying and pasting.

Channels redefined

With so much focus on Sources, the WING Rack, along with the entire WING series of digital mixers, has to go beyond the historical definition of what a channel is, as well. With 374 Sources, a single 1-channel input seems a little underpowered. That’s why the WING workflow has redefined what a single channel can do. Each of its 48 channels — 40 inputs plus eight returns — can operate as mono, stereo, or mid-side. And when you assign a stereo Source to a channel, it automatically renders the channel in stereo. On top of that, each channel features an alternate (ALT) input that can also be stereo, which makes toggling between two Sources a breeze.

The WING Rack’s ALT inputs are a lifesaver. For example, say you have stereo tracks playing from a computer, but you also have a redundant hardware track player synced to the computer. If the computer fails, the hardware tracks can take over either with a command or automatically. On a traditional console, that would take four channels; on the WING Rack, it’s just one. Simply route the computer’s stereo Source to a single channel. Then, specify the ALT input as the hardware player stereo signal. Other applications could be a redundant vocal mic. If the battery in a wireless transmitter unexpectedly goes out, the vocalist grabs a backup microphone, and the signal immediately switches to the second mic. Again, this uses just one channel. Virtual soundchecks have never been more straightforward. Just assign your 48 USB playback tracks or 64 XLive playback tracks to ALT inputs, hit play, and everything can automatically switch and be ready for your virtual soundcheck.

Mono or stereo? It’s all the same to the WING Rack

The WING Rack’s 48 input channels and 28 bus mixes can be used for mono, stereo, or mid-side sources — no channel linking required. And, as noted above, when you assign a stereo Source to a channel, it automatically renders the channel in stereo. Best of all, there’s no need to reboot the mixer when you apply a mode change (the live sound engineers here at Sweetwater did backflips when they realized this). This means you can make on-the-fly changes from mono to stereo and back again.