Harrison Series Twelve 56 ch. Digitally Controlled Analog Console

I'm reluctantly having to sell my beloved Harrison Analog Series 12 Console. I'm the second owner of this beautiful console, and I've used it in my smoke free private mixing room.

This is a 56 channels digitally controlled analog mixing desk which is absolutely perfect for today's way of hybrid mixing : it gives you full total recall (takes a second to load a recall file) and total automation of every parameters ! It sounds fantastic, as you would expect for a high end Harrison Console (these things cost hundreds of thousands of $$$ !).

All the analog channels were recapped in 2013, and the channels PSU's were replaced with big linear PSUs (one PSU for each rack of 16 channels, so 4 in total) which cost over 4000€.

The console gives you :

• 48 mono channels
• 4 stereo channels (so 56 total)
• 8 aux sends
• 24 mixing busses and 2 stereo master/program busses.
• The console is full surround ready, with up to 7.1 panning.
• Every channel has an expander/gate, a compressor, 4 bands full parametric EQ and a pair of filters.
• 8 great sounding remote controlled Harrison Mic Preamps,
• Everything, I mean everything is save/recallable and automatable.

Here’s how the system is organized :

The remote control desk/panel which has :

• 24 motorized faders linked to ch 1-24,
• 8 motorized faders controlling 4 layers for ch 25 to 56,
• 4 remote/VCA group faders (plus you can configure 4 of the channel faders to become remote/VCA faders),
• a complete centered channel control panel with lots of encoders and LED screens (jumps to any channel when you touch its fader), so you never have to leave the monitoring sweet spot while adjusting EQ/Comp/Etc.,
• 2 master faders with a pair of bargraph Vu meters,
• Full analog monitoring controls (full surround capable, as the whole console is up to 7.1 ready) along with a talkback mic input and gain.
• A touchscreen mimicking the whole console, plus save/recall, channel naming, automation save/recall, etc.

The Channels Rack : This holds the analog cards for every channels and the 4 master PGM channels (so you also get EQ and dynamics on the mixbus!).

The Monitor/ Mic Preamp Rack : holds the crosspoint router used by the monitoring matrix, and the cards with the 8 mic preamps (I think some additional preamps might be added if wanted, but this would need to be discussed directly with Harrison)

The big Power Supplies Rack : it’s a full height rack tower, but only half of it is used by the PS’s, so there’s space left for computers, converters, etc. It holds one PSU for the remote desk, and 4 linear PSU’s for the channel rack.

The Small rack and the Mac : this small rack has a platform on top of it with the MacIIVx sitting on it. The mac essentially provides code to every element on startup, feeds the touchscreen graphics, and stores the snapshots and automation files. I’ve used the small rack to house a UPS and the mic pre and monitoring power supplies (but these PS's could be put in the big rack too).

All of these elements are connected together by a high speed serial network, and are designed so that only the remote control desk has to be in the control room, with everything else being in a technical locker with air conditioning.

The main audio connections are on the back of the channels rack, and use ribbon connectors. I’ve used special crimped subD25 connectors at the other end of the ribbons, and then used subD25 to subD25 or XLR looms to go to and from the AD/DA converters and outboards. But I also have a number of IDC to Cannon DL Zif adapters specially built by Harrison, if one would prefer this as a mean to interface the console with his/her studio. Anyhow, these ribbon connectors are very easy to get for cheap (one of them connects as many as 8 channels). See  for the connectors fitting the on the channels racks side and . They are very easy to crimp on the ribbon cables (there's a simple and cheap special tool to do it).

The console comes with its complete documentation and schematics, and here’s a short list of the spares I have :

• One MacIIVx with cloned system and Harrison shell hard drive, ready to plug and play in case the console’s one has a problem
• 2 spare power supplies for the MacIIVx (though in 15 years use I’ve never needed them !)
• One central shared panel (the one controlling every channel’s parameter like EQ, dynamics, auxes, ...)
• 2 Input/output cards, 1 Processing/Mux card, and 1 Assignment card (take one of each of these and you have a full channel), 1 peripheral processor board (that’s one 16 channels chassis’s brain), and other spares (fader drivers, faders, encoders, etc.)
• Loads of ribbon cables (the initial owners had the racks 25 meters away from their control room).

So there you are, I’m sure there are a few small things that I forgot to mention, but it certainly mostly is all here.

This has been a surprisingly reliable system (probably partly because no actual audio flows in the remote desk itself, so no moving part with audio in it), the only serious problem I had was when the old CRT touchscreen went kaput, but then having it fixed by using a flat LCD display with the touch panel in front of it works very well, and it’s also much shallower and nicer to use (you can see it on the pictures BTW, it’s the display on the left). I’ve powered the console down every evening to avoid power consumption during the night, and it has always started happily every morning. I guess having the whole studio running on a dedicated large online double conversion UPS must also have helped protecting it from electrical harm, but I mostly think Harrison built these things like tanks (actually they sold them for the price of tanks too ! :-P) !

Please send me a message for any questions you might have about this console.