Live Sound: Helix Native vs Helix Rack outboard?

[JohnSmith2]

Hi team,

TL;DR: anybody using Helix Native in a live performance setting? Within that, anybody done an A/B of the sound vs the Helix outboard units?

Longer context:
I occasionally play in a pretty tech-forward ampless setup where me and 2x guitarists all go wirelessly into Helix Rack units controlled by the helix foot control units. The drummer plays eDrums and we all use wireless IEMs (well, the drummer is wired)

The system is actually totally digital: the tech guys uses a shure system that has dante natively, and the helix rack units have dante/AES adapters for the in and out. The processed signals are then multicast to FoH (dante) Monitor mixer (dante) and recording (dante).

System works great but man is lugging those 9Us of helix rack units plus the foot controllers a drag. It's also a bit "fiddly" with the adapters.

We're discussing replacing all 3 with a single mac mini running Helix Native in Ableton + a thunderbolt dante adapter. Drops 9 heavy rack units to 1U (half full!) of mac mini. And in fact, we already have the mac mini and dante adapter in the system, so there's no marginal equipment (unless 3 more channels of processing proves to be too taxing and we need to upgrade the mac mini) at all!

Anybody explored such a thing? any experiences worth sharing?

Thanks!

 

[Barisaxman]

Realize this a an older post, but really the only advice I could give you since you have the PC is to give it a try. The biggest hurdle to using software solutions live is the total system latency. You're processing three signal chains in the software and then outputting to a PA system and IEM's. Most likely the amount of latency even using IEM's is going to be noticeable and throw off your timing as a musician.