Purely hypothetical on my part and I hope people in the Mothership are eavesdropping here.
If you could have your GLD brought up to date, would you pay for that privilege? Updating consoles has breathed new life into nice mixing desks since the analog days. Recently other digital boards have been upgraded. Soundcraft has a Vi upgrade. A&H’s stablemate Digico has offered a Stealth Core 2 upgrade. The rest of the GLD system is great but the innards are showing their age. Our GLDs are laid out quite nicely. The surface can serve my purpose for quite a while to come. This kind of upgrade shows you are making an investment not just a purchase.
What three features would you want and would you be willing to pay for it? If there is a revenue stream maybe A&H can justify the resources.
As for me I would be willing to pay for:
1- Side-Chain compression
2- Fix that illogical scene recall system and a few other scene related issues.
3-I don’t need anything more. You pick.
I did pay for an upgrade. It’s called an M-Waves card and it gives me access to the entire Waves catalog, giving me absolutely everything that I need a much more.
Sidechain? Had it for years.
Compressors, EQ’s, Gates, noise reduction, AMM. All there.
So I have a world class desk that can talk to any other Waves compatible desk.
Well side chain would be nice to have, but I’m not sure I would be prepared to pay much for it. Say £100 max.
What I WOULD like is multitrack recording as on the QU, but I can already get that by paying £900 or so, and for that I get ALL the channels, so again it would need to be significantly cheaper than that.
More mix busses would be wonderful. I’d pay a fair bit for that, but I won’t hold my breath.
You need an M-Waves card ($500 - $1000 on e-bay [$1599 new]). You need a Waves Impact Server ($400 - $500 on e-bay [$700 new]). A Waves Bundle starting at $99 for Musician-2 or separate plugins starting at $39. A laptop. A gigabit switch (< $50). A few Cat5e cables to connect everything (<$10).
It doesn’t need to be a high end laptop since all of the processing is down at the server level. I have a 15.9" Toshiba convertible laptop, Quad Core I7 with 8 GB Ram and 1TB drive that I picked last year for $550. I know you can find really good laptops starting around $450.
I would pay for an Android App and OSC-Support.
Along with some more Softkey-Functions and flexible Mono-/Stereo-Channels it would be easy money for A&H
More RTA-functionality would be nice to have - but nothing I would pay for if it would be the only new feature I would use.