I find de-essers to be fairly essential in low-volume HoW environments, and I very frequently need more than 6 channels (usually 8), but the Qu6 only has 6 FX engines and 2-3 are always needed for reverb/delay. This basically means I have to us De-Essers as a bus processing effect (way too far down the chain) or place them individually on the 2-3 most egregious channels. I’ve noticed that I can put a valve preamp on every channel in the source block, and I think it would be a very nice feature to use the de-esser at the beginning of the chain in the same position. De-essers are great tools, but they don’t work well if you have to gang the vocals together.
+1 for the use of the word “egregious”. 
As a non-native-English-speaker, I googled “HoW environments” but couldn’t find anything relevant.
What does that mean, please?
“Houses of Worship” - ie churches
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Ah - thank you! . . .
I wholeheartedly agree!
I purchased the De-Esser for the Qu7 only to learn it wasn’t an insert. I am stuck picking a few effects slots to tame a vocal and it becomes locked to that channel as an insert That is good, but it falls way short. I have 6 vocal channels.
Lets go A&H!!! While you are at, multiple inserts on channels would be awesome!
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this is similar on the Avantis (and prob dLive too), althought they both have more FX slots available of course.
I’ve got four FX slots dedicated to DeEssing on our Avantis, since the are none available as inserts. Of course, you could go oldschool and set up a compressor as a DeEsser and/or bus your vocals to DeEss them as a whole.
That said, it would be cool if either of the dynamics slots had a dedicated DeEsser as an option.
+1 always.
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You can always just pop the de-esser on a group instead of a single channel!
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Agreed. In the meantime, you can use the channel compressor with sidechain set up around 4k or so.
The mixture of male and female vocals, the individual sibulence, plus the impact of timing between them, says no to a group compressor, I need an insert.
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Agree, there should be stand alone desser that can be enraged on any channel you want without having to use use limited fx blocks. Even the touchmix 16 (has its own sigificant deficiencies) from 2014 but had deessers. Even if not the perfect de-sseer having it available on any channel made sense. Digital mixers have come a long way since 2014 and if anything it seems to like it should be even easier to implement that feature on newer digital mixers where it likely would be even better.
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The discontinued iLive has Deesser on individual inputs.
I’m not sure of the relevance to the topic at hand.
The iLive was the “flagship” level offering from A&H at the time. The QU certainly is not A&H current flagship level offering, nor has it ever been the flagship level offering. If you are expecting the QU to have flagship level features, you are going to be disappointed with nearly every function/feature of the QU because none of them are “flagship level” in scope or flexibility. This is by design and it is not an oversight on A&H part.
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With all due respect, I am not so sure the T series was considered a flagship system.
I understand your point to a certain degree, but it’s just a filter. We may as well not have standard compressors and gates included in the input chain either for a console at that price. UI Soundcraft includes it, that is an example.
Maybe my comment by using a product line with a short life cycle was not a good example, but there are other systems that included it at the time that were not considered “flagship”.
I would suggest to add a possibility, to select a de-esser instead of the gate. So there is no need of more processor power. I can’t imagine a use case, where you need both, gate and de-esser. That would really improve the use of two dynamics in every channel!
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How did you conclude that a dynamic compressor “de-esser” doesn’t require more processor power compared to a simple gate?
Please consider that in the case of a QU2.0 with its dedicated FX units, only a maximum of 6 de-esser are possible, but you would need to provide an additional processing power for more than 32!
And furthermore, there must be no additional latency in these channels - unlike the FX units.
Please don’t misunderstand, because we would all naturally like to see this implemented in SQ and Avantis as well, but - well …
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With the noise gate, you have a ‘fader’ depending of the level of a signal. additionally you have the side chain filters - in every single channel. The same things you need for a de-esser, there is not much more to calculate.
Considering the point in the signal path (after a compressor, that would egalise again the reduced levels of the ‘s’ etc.), It would be great to have the choice ‘gate or comp’ at the position of the actual gate and ‘comp or de-ess’ at the point of the actual compressor.
This would make me happy 
But A&H would lose the sellings of the de-essers in the add-on shop…
That you have 6 fx-slots, independently what kind of fx you choose - that’s another story. You can’t tell me, that a compressor or a delay needs as much pocessor power as a reverb.
… and i miss an additional PEQ with up to 8 bands. Oh - why not the choice of ‘geq or fba or peq with 8 bands’ in the mixes? No leak of ideas 
But the ideas grow because i see, what is possible for a desk at this price. I wait for a QU-5 and will be happy when it comes!
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After having bought the all add ons bundle for our Qu, I’m a little dissapointed to find out that unlike the dual DeEsser per FX slot on our Avantis, the Qu only gives a single DeEsser per FX slot. Considering that unlike the Avantis, the Qu puts DynEQs in FX slots too, this limitation of the DeEsser is dissapointing.
I understand that the screen is smaller on the Qu, but it would be good to at least have a dual mono DeEsser per FX slot, with a toggle to switch between channels. A DeEsser mode for the compressor and/or gate slots would be welcome too.
BTW: for anyone looking for more ways to have a DeEsser:
You can always just use the sidechain filter on the compressor to set up a wideband DeEsser.
Nothing necessarily wrong with that, outside of losing your compressor 
It’s a bit off-topic for this thread, but this very useful feature suggestion has existed for SQ for several years - for example, here:
Strangely enough, it has always received little attention and support.
Perhaps with the new QU users will bring it a bit back to light …
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And that’s precisely what’s not the case with A&H’s high-quality de-essers.
They analyze the signal for sibilants, completely independent of their signal levels, so that also dynamic vocals always sound similar and not just loud sibilants are attenuated.
And this of course produces a more natural sound, but it’s also more difficult to implement and therefore requires more processing power.
It’s the same for the flagship dLive down to the little QU2.0.
A&H probably wouldn’t agree to include some cheap-sounding version just to say, “We now have a de-esser in every channel.”
And they would absolutely avoid introducing any additional latency in the channel strip due to the de-essers.
I obviously cannot know these things, but they would be typical for manufacturers who place particular importance on sound quality.
I could more readily imagine replacing the chanel compressor with a de-esser, but I’m afraid most users wouldn’t want to give up the compressor just to be able to de-ess …
I want to emphasize again that I would also like to have all of this, but I understand that resources are limited, and therefore so are the possibilities.
But perhaps I’m wrong, and there are still plenty of reserves.
After all, A&H promised to tell us here if something was definitely not possible.
That suggests that it is possible, and I’m mistaken. )
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