SOFTUBE Console 1 Fader £527 STREET
A few years back, in 2014, Softube released the original Console 1; a new, and in some ways peculiar, hardware controller. The peculiar thing about this unit isn’t that it contains no faders; rather, it’s in the way it communicates with a DAW. Many, if not all, DAW controllers rely on Mackie Control and/or HUI communication protocols to communicate with the host DAW, and support for one or other of these protocols is baked into all mainstream DAW software. In contrast, the Console 1 system communicates with its own bespoke software layer, which in turn is linked to channels in the DAW by inserting the Console 1 plug-in onto every channel. The software layer can then host channel strip emulations that process the DAW channel’s audio.
The USP of Softube’s approach was (and
