Yes, it’s old and pricey, but it’s very well made and does a lot of good stuff. it follows your track focus and it’s also very easy to cycle through your track list on the unit itself, so it being only being a single track unit does not present much of a problem. It’s very well integrated into my work flow so I make a lot of use of it. The EQ section is very useful for quick straightforward adjustments using the stock EQ, which I use a lot for basic tasks. I’ve tried quite a lot of control units and the fader on the 121 is IMHO by far the best feeling - I come from the age of large format analogue mixing desks and this thing feels like a proper, classy fader with a firm but light response - most other controllers feel like, err, controllers! The big AI knob has the same solid feel and is just as useful as the fader. A big plus is that the unit takes up very little space on my desk and it’s very solidly made, quite heavy and with a good feel to the other buttons and knobs as well. The 2 scenarios where I use it most are firstly during tracking sessions, where it’s great having a unit that does transport, basic EQ and sends, fader duties, mute/solo/audition buttons and control room management all together. On mixing sessions I use it extensively for writing and editing automation.
For those 2 studio scenarios, in my case, it’s more or less perfect. It’s very easy and intuitive to use and speeds up that type of work immensely. In mix sessions I also use it as a monitor controller, switching between different meters, sets of monitors, reference levels etc together with channel mute/solo/listen and quick EQ features of course. For complete control of every aspect of a DAW it probably doesn’t hold up so well. more so now we’re on C9.5 than was the case when I first started using it with C5 and it’s more limited feature set.
I had an Avid Atrist Control for quite a while but despite it having 8 faders found it didn’t make much of a difference to my workflow. Typical projects of mine have 50 or more tracks and it was actually harder to navigate to the one you wanted to work on. It was useful for laying out and balancing simple submixes though! Despite having quite a large touch screen the deep access was often more faff than just using keyboard shortcuts and the size of the thing meant I was always leaning over and peering at things. The “feel” of the thing wasn’t half as good as the Steinberg either.
I’ve also tried the X-touch but didn’t get on with it - you get a lot of features but the thing doesn’t really feel as robust or accurate as the 121 or the Avid. You do get a lot of features for the price with the Behringer though, for sure. Again, like the Avid, it wasn’t a large format fully featured desk nor was it a compact quick controller. It worked fine but I found it had more features than i was using, just my accustomed workflow I guess. And although the thing did the job just fine, It just had a bit of a budget quality feel to it. Fine for light use I’m sure but in professional studio type scenario I’d worry about it’s physical work capacity. (That’s not a Behringer quality rant BTW, they’re generally pretty good nowadays and I use an ADA8000 and 8200 which have never let me down and are great units for the price and my purpose)
Would I buy a 121 nowadays? (I’ve had mine for a quite a few years). To be honest, I’m not sure, but it’s so ingrained in my workflow in my own studio now that it often seems very strange and slow if I have to work without it. If it broke down, I’d certainly look for a S/H replacement and would consider buying another one new. If I was going through a significant studio upgrade, I would of course look around and try the currently available alternatives but would still consider keeping it as part of a new setup, and I think it might be hard to find something else of the same quality that would work as well for me.
I wish Steinberg would invest more in the 121- it’s a great concept, and If they were to bring out other modern controllers, aligned to modern versions of Cubase, of the same build quality and well thought out feature sets, I’d be paying close attention to them.