New SSL 500 Series

On first impression they seam cool but if I were at the point of spending money I would be looking at these and be thinking;
1 the channel strip looks cool on a feature sheet but, everything is really not all that feature rich, would I really use the stripped down EQ or Dynamics? Or would I be better off with a real EQ and Comp?.
Stereo EQ is cool, but it’s 2 spaces and stereo pots don’t always track that well. I can use a stereo EQ as a mono, but I can use 2 mono almost as well and I can tweak for channel differences.
Now when I first heard about the strip I was thinking “ OK if they took a full channel of the Six and let me connect them via ribbon cables in 500 series chassis for bussing and I could build a 24 ch summing system based on the 6, that would be cool. This isn’t that.

That’s kind of a loaded question, I mean OK maybe the overall sonics might be better, but with just about any plugins I’m going to be able to dive deep and do more, plus for the price of one of the strips I can probably grab a EQ and dynamics package that I could put on everything.
It really feels like baby’s first SSL. I’m sure GC will sell a ton $400 isn’t bad for what it is. I suspect like say the Austin mics they will sell a bunch and in 6-12 months we see 2 pages full of used ones because the customer out grew them.

I don’t completely disagree, but the problem with 2 bands of fixed point EQ is it’s probably never going to be where you want it. In the days when most small studios and clubs had EQ’s with 3 or 4 fixed band EQ’s my Rack of 4 AudioArts Parametrics were my best friend, not because of all the bands but because I could put the EQ where I wanted. The guy who buys these is not going to have a ton of mic choices so I see it as very limited as a problem solver.
Maybe my days selling gear makes me biased against little do everything strips, but that’s because they always seamed to come back .

If you can solder and are chasing the SSL tone for not much more the link audio EQ and pre are going to give you the SSL sound that everybody really wants, granted you would lose the comp, but still if someone says SSL I think 4K!

I guess I missed that they were fixed point eqs, that does take a lot of the utility out of it. For comparison my LA610 has a very limited high and low shelf but with 3 eq points each and I find those incredibly useful.