Pro Audio · Digital Mixers
The Digital Mixer That Records Your Gig And Hands You A Soundcheck The Next Day (PreSonus StudioLive Series III SE 16 and SE 24)
By Iqmal · Music Bliss | 22 October 2026 | 11 min read
It is 8:15 on a Sunday morning. The band arrives at 9:00, the service starts at 10:00, and the person on the desk is a volunteer who learned the console from whoever had the job before them. There is a livestream going out, six radio microphones, in-ear monitors for four musicians, and nobody has time to build a mix from nothing. Next week it will be a different volunteer and a different band, and the whole thing starts again.
The PreSonus StudioLive Series III SE 16 and SE 24 are built around that problem rather than around a feature list. Both are 40-channel consoles that record every input while you mix, play those recordings back through the desk as if the band were in the room, and let an engineer log in from another city to sort out the routing when something goes wrong.
This article covers what those capabilities actually do day to day, how the two models differ, what they do not do, and which rooms they genuinely suit.
It Records The Whole Show, Three Different Ways
This is the part that separates the StudioLive line from most of its competition, and it is worth being specific about, because "it records" means three distinct things here.
1. Straight to an SD card, with no computer at all
Put a card in, arm the tracks, press record. The console captures the show as multitrack audio with nothing else connected — no laptop perched on a flight case at front of house, no USB cable to trip over, no DAW session to crash mid-set. AudioTechnology's review of the SE 24 reports up to 34 tracks this way. For a band recording their own gigs, or a church that wants every service archived, this removes the entire fragile part of the process.
2. Over USB, as a 64×64 interface
One USB cable to a computer gives you 64 channels in and 64 channels out, simultaneously. The console is mixing the room and feeding a DAW at the same time, which means the multitrack for a live album, the isolated stems for a livestream mix, and the FOH feed are all coming from one desk. Building the equivalent as a separate 32-input recording interface would cost a meaningful fraction of the console.
3. Over the network
AVB audio networking carries 64 channels over Ethernet, which is how you get inputs from a stage box at the other end of a hall rather than running a copper multicore to it.
Three paths, and they are not mutually exclusive. The practical value is redundancy: if the laptop dies mid-show, the SD card is still recording.
Virtual Soundcheck: Mix Last Night's Band This Morning
Here is where the recording capability stops being a nice extra and becomes the reason to buy the console.
Record the show. Afterwards, connect that recording back to the desk and switch the inputs from the live microphones to the recorded tracks. PreSonus Capture handles this with what the company describes as one-click Virtual Soundcheck, and it brings the channel names and routing across with it rather than making you rebuild the session.
Press play, and the console behaves as though the band is standing on stage again.
With nobody in the building, you can tune the PA to the room, rebuild a scene from scratch, fix the EQ on a vocal that was fighting you all night, set up compression properly instead of guessing under pressure, work on effects, and — the one that matters most for a church or a school — train a new operator on real material.
Think about what that changes for a volunteer-run room. Instead of learning the desk during a live service with a congregation watching, somebody can sit with last Sunday's multitrack on a Tuesday evening and make every mistake they need to make. The band is not waiting. Nothing is going out to the stream. When they do run a live service, they have already mixed that band.
For a venue, it is the difference between soundchecking a support act properly and hoping. For a touring engineer, it is a way to walk into an unfamiliar room and get the system most of the way there before the truck is unloaded.
Metro: Fixing A Console You Are Not Standing In Front Of
Most digital consoles can be controlled from a tablet on the same local network. Metro extends that over the internet, and for anyone who installs or supports systems it is the feature worth paying attention to.
The scenario is familiar to every integrator. You commissioned a console in a church in Johor. You are in Kuala Lumpur. They call on a Sunday morning: the pastor's microphone has vanished from the livestream feed. Someone changed a matrix assignment during the week and nobody knows which one.
With Metro, an authorised engineer can connect to that console remotely, look at the routing, find what changed and put it back — without a four-hour drive. For a system integrator supporting installations across several states, or a volunteer-run venue with nobody on site who understands the desk, that is a genuinely different support model.
Two things to understand before you plan around it
Metro is more specific than "the console is on the internet."
- It needs a host computer connected to the mixer by USB at the venue end, and a client computer at yours. The console does not reach the internet on its own. Any installation intending to use Metro needs that machine specified, powered and left running.
- PreSonus themselves advise against using it to mix a live show. Their own guidance is blunt about why: you will not be able to hear the mix in the room, or catch feedback before it builds.
Metro is built for remote support, configuration and checking — not for mixing FOH from a different city. Used for what it is designed for, it is excellent. Sold as remote live mixing, it will disappoint.
Milan-Certified AVB, And What The Certification Actually Buys You
StudioLive consoles have carried AVB networking for years. What is new across the current generation is that the networking is Milan-certified, and that distinction is worth explaining because "it has networking" tells you nothing.
Most digital consoles connect to their own manufacturer's stage boxes over the manufacturer's own protocol. That works, and it locks you in — your I/O expansion options are whatever that company sells.
Milan is an independently certified standard built on AVB, and third-party certification is a guarantee of interoperability rather than a marketing claim. PreSonus's own wording is that it "ensures reliable, low-latency, time-aligned AVB audio networking with guaranteed interoperability." In practice it means a console, stage boxes, personal monitor mixers and other manufacturers' Milan-certified devices can share one Ethernet network and be expected to work together.
For a permanent installation, that changes the calculation. A venue is not buying into a dead end; it is buying a node on a standards-based network it can extend later.
In the PreSonus ecosystem that means NSB stage boxes to get inputs from the stage on one Ethernet cable, and EarMix 16M personal monitor mixers so musicians build their own in-ear mixes at their own position on stage. New to in-ears? Start with How To Build Your Band's In-Ear Monitoring System For Live Shows.
The honest limitation: this is AVB, not Dante
A great many Malaysian rental companies, venues and broadcast facilities are standardised on Dante. If yours is, the SE consoles reach it through PreSonus's AVB-D16 bridge rather than natively, and that is a real extra box, an extra cost and an extra point of configuration. If your entire facility already runs Dante end to end, a natively Dante-equipped console from another manufacturer may simply fit better, and we would rather say so now than after you have bought.
Fat Channel: Studio Processing On A Live Desk
Every digital mixer has channel EQ and compression. The difference here is what kind.
Alongside the standard four-band EQ and dynamics, both consoles carry the full Fat Channel Collection — 7 EQ models and 8 compressor models — available on every input and every bus. These are modelled on classic studio hardware rather than being one generic digital compressor applied everywhere.
What that changes is how you approach a channel. Rather than reaching for the same processor on everything and varying the settings, you can choose the character the way you would in a studio: a fast FET-style compressor on a snare where you want the attack controlled hard, something gentler and more opto-flavoured on a bass guitar or a vocal where you want the gain reduction to be less obvious, a different EQ voicing on an acoustic guitar than on a kick drum, and a different compressor again across a bus.
The other half of it is physical. The SE consoles give Fat Channel real knobs and buttons rather than burying it in touchscreen pages, and AudioTechnology's reviewer specifically praised having direct access to source selection, channel assignment, polarity and phantom power without menu-diving. On a live show, the number of screen taps between you and a parameter is not a cosmetic issue — it is the difference between fixing something during a song and fixing it after.
This is where the name earns itself. It is a studio processing philosophy on a console built for live work.
FlexMixes And The Split Fader Surface
Two workflow details that matter more in practice than they read on a spec sheet.
Sixteen FlexMixes
Sixteen buses is unremarkable. What is useful is that each one can be configured as an aux, a subgroup or a matrix, rather than the console deciding for you how many of each you are allowed.
The same desk therefore reconfigures completely between jobs. A church might set up six mixes as in-ear feeds, two as wedges, one as front fill, one as a delay ring, two as a livestream feed and the rest as subgroups. A corporate venue doing an AGM might turn most of them into matrices for different zones and recording feeds. A band's monitor engineer might make nearly all of them monitor sends. Add 24 DCAs, four dedicated subgroups and four effects buses on top, and the routing stops being a constraint you design around.
Coverage, timing, monitoring and recall are the same four problems a stadium tour solves at scale — see How Do You Make 50,000 People Hear the Same Thing at Once? Inside Metallica's M72 Stage.
Two fader banks that show different things
On the SE 24, the surface splits into 16 faders on the left and eight on the right, and the two sections can display different things at once — input channels on one side while the other holds DCAs, buses, effects returns or monitor mixes.
That sounds minor until you have mixed on a compact digital console and spent a show bouncing between an input layer, a bus layer and a DCA layer to make three adjustments. Keeping your inputs under your left hand while your groups and monitor sends stay under your right is closer to how an analogue desk behaves, and for a busy show it removes a genuine source of mistakes.
SE 16 Or SE 24? The Name Is Not The Answer
This is the most misunderstood thing about these two consoles, and getting it right changes which one you buy.
Neither number refers to the mixing engine. Both the SE 16 and the SE 24 are 40-channel, 26-bus consoles with 16 FlexMixes, 24 DCAs, four subgroups, four effects buses, 64×64 USB and Milan-certified AVB. The processing, the recording and the networking are the same on both. What differs is how many faders you get, and how much analogue I/O is built into the back panel.
SE 16 | SE 24 | |
|---|---|---|
Mixing engine | 40 channels, 26 buses | 40 channels, 26 buses |
Motorised faders | 17 | 25 (split 16 + 8) |
XMAX-Remote preamps | 17 — 16 mic inputs plus talkback | 33 — 32 mic inputs plus talkback (16 on combo connectors) |
Rear analogue outputs | — | 16 |
Recording & networking | SD multitrack, 64×64 USB, Milan AVB | SD multitrack, 64×64 USB, Milan AVB |
Best for | Compact FOH, mobile and livestream rigs, inputs from a stage box | A full band plugged straight into the desk, more surface under your hands |
So the question to ask is not "do I need sixteen channels or twenty-four?" It is "how much of my input list plugs in locally, and how much physical surface do I want under my hands?"
Choose the SE 16 if you want the full 40-channel console architecture in the smallest possible footprint, and you are happy for most inputs to arrive over the network from a stage box. That suits a touring engineer with a tight FOH position, a mobile livestream rig, a compact church, or anyone who values the flight case being smaller. You are not buying a lesser console — you are buying the same brain with a smaller face.
Choose the SE 24 if you want to plug a full band straight into the back of the desk without buying a stage box on day one, and you want more channels physically in front of you. Thirty-two local microphone inputs covers a large worship team, a full band with drums miked properly, or a theatre production, with no network infrastructure required at all.
There is also an SE 32 above both, and rackmount versions of the range, if the surface is not what you need.
Who Should Actually Be Upgrading
Houses of worship are the clearest fit in Malaysia, and it is not close. Weekly services, volunteer operators who change, a livestream that has to work, in-ear monitors for a worship team, and a system that somebody external installed and supports. Virtual Soundcheck trains your volunteers, the recording paths feed the stream and the archive, Metro lets your integrator help without driving, and the EarMix units let musicians sort out their own monitors instead of signalling at the desk mid-song.
Venues and live rooms that also make content. If you are already mixing the show, capturing a proper multitrack of it costs you an SD card. That is a live album, a YouTube channel or a demo for the band, out of work you were doing anyway.
AV integrators and installers. Metro and Milan are aimed at you specifically. Remote support changes what a service agreement can realistically cover, and a standards-based network means a venue you fit out this year can be extended in three years without replacing the spine.
Schools, colleges and music centres. Rotating student operators, a desk that recalls scenes reliably, password-protected user profiles so a student cannot accidentally undo the gain structure, and recorded material to teach on.
Bands and mobile production. The SE 16 in particular — a 40-channel console that fits in a rack and records the gig without a laptop is a lot of capability for a van.
Coming from the live-sound side? Read our Malay-language guide: Perasan Tak Kenapa Kat Konsert Atau Festival Pakai Speaker Ni? (Line Arrays).
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Consoles
- PreSonus StudioLive Series III SE 16 Digital Mixer
- PreSonus StudioLive Series III SE 24 Digital Mixer
Networked stage boxes
- PreSonus NSB8.8 AVB Networked Stage Box
- PreSonus NSB16.8 AVB Networked Stage Box
- PreSonus NSB32.16 AVB Networked Stage Box
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Music Bliss · Team Onyx
Come And Get Your Hands On One
Specifications only tell you so much about a console. What decides it is whether the surface makes sense to you, how quickly you can find a parameter under pressure, and whether the workflow matches how your room actually runs.
So come in and mix on one. Bring your input list and your channel count, tell us how your room is wired, whether you are on Dante already, whether you stream, and who operates the desk on a normal week — and we will work out whether the SE 16 or the SE 24 is the right one, what stage box you need with it, and whether you need one at all.
Through Team Onyx, our professional audio division, we handle consultation, system design, delivery and installation for houses of worship, schools, venues and permanent installs. By Musicians, For Musicians.
About the author
Iqmal
Iqmal is part of the Music Bliss team, writing about live sound, recording and the gear on our showroom floor — and how it actually gets used on a real gig.
