Stanton Magnetics SA-8 Reviews

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Good Points: Two channels plus aux in. Lots of meaty bass. Pure Analog. Great crossfader. Two crossfader's to choose from. Loud headphone jack. Multitrack outs.

Bad Points: Led meters. Frequency response. Headphone cue pan. Overall fit and finish.

General comments: I was so stoked about the Stanton Magnetics SA-8 mixer. $200 on sale at Guitar Center. Holy cow, what a deal on a $700 mixer. And I'd heard it was better than many other mixers. Well, there's a reason it's being discontinued. And if the following problems were fixed, this would be a very formidable piece of gear. First, the sound quality is a little too bassy. Now, I know a lot of people want that, but there's no way this mixer's response is neutral. The PPDO1 might be a little cold and thin sounding, but the Stanton SA-8 is at the opposite extreme. Interestingly, the phono preamps are also not RIAA-rated and roll off the high frequencies slightly. Combined with the mixer's overall sound, records become bassy and rolled off. Only the brightest records I had sounded clear and detailed to any significant degree. If you use bright-sounding carts and crank the volume up to club levels, this might be forgivable, or even desirable if you're into the old Bozak mixers. Next, the led meters are too short and don't bounce. They show peak holds and are pretty much worthless as a beatmatching visual aid. They're simply not long enough to give you an accurate representation of small gain changes. Finally, and the most vexing issue, is the headphone cue pan. Now the main crossfader on the mixer has a curve control. At one end is an abrupt cliff curve, and at the other is supposed to be a gradual blending curve. Oddly enough, the summation dip when in the middle of the crossfader on this last curve is enormous. The dip's so big you get a massive drop in even the combined volume of both channels. But because the crossfader curve is continuous, you can put it at between 10 and 11 o'clock to get a perfect blend curve. This is something Numark has yet to allow you to do on any of its mixers. HOWEVER, the SA-8's cue pan/crossfader (for monitoring the channels through your headphones) is fixed at the same curve as when the main crossfader's curve control is all the way to the left. So, when you're monitoring both channels in headphones there's the massive drop in volume. Instead of being able to simply flick the little fader to go from both channels to just one, you also have to adjust the headphone volume, otherwise you blast your eardrums. Real fun. Stanton includes an auto cue feature where the cue pan is overriden and the opposite channel to the main crossfader is sent through the headphones, but apart from dedicated scratching, I don't see this as being worthwhile. If they can't get the most basic, necessary features of a mixer correct, they shouldn't be worring about "revolutionary" special features. Quite simply, it is a pain in the bum to mix with this thing, and if you are successful at it, you're rewarded with sound that would make only bass-heads happy. On a final note, I also became aware of some defects in the signal flows inside the mixer. There were errant low-level hums and buzzings depending on whether a channel was open or a switch was flicked. Not too bad, but should be quiet no matter how it's set up at the moment. That spoke to probably a lack of beta testing on Stanton's part. It's surprising how many companies create "product brackets" and don't actually even test them in real situations before releasing to the market. A crying shame.