I've done live mixing with a laptop, DAW, and interface in the past and it does work but it's not something I would be comfortable with for an important show. E

I've done live mixing with a laptop, DAW, and interface in the past and it does work but it's not something I would be comfortable with for an important show. Even with something like SAC (which is specifically designed for the task) the chance of hangs, crashes, etc. go up as at the end of the day it's just a program running on top of your OS. The setup and config also gets a bit hacky and you'll be the only one able to use it. As far as I know the only specialized system that does this is the Waves LV1 which has a dedicated OS running on top of x86 hardware for processing. While I haven't tried it apparently it works quite well. However I was more thinking of mixers like the QSC Touchmix/X32/etc. where the DSP probably eats up quite a bit of the unit cost, and how the price could be significantly brought down if the innards merely contained analog I/O and converters all tying into a powerful SoC.