Hello Allen & Heath team,
I’ve been using the CQ-18T for a while now and there's lots to love about it – super portable, sounds great, and the wireless control is rock solid and perfectly suits my needs. But I’ve run into something with FX routing that’s caused headaches, especially when it comes to monitor mixes.
As you know, on the CQ line, FX sends are always post-fader and follow the Main LR fader, no matter what. The problem with this is that if I pull a channel down in the Main LR mix, the FX level drops too, even if that channel is still loud in a monitor mix.
I sometimes do my own mixing on stage while performing (no front-of-house engineer), so I rely on being able to hear the FX levels clearly in my monitor to know they’re set right. If the FX send is tied to the Main LR fader and that fader is down, I hear less (or zero) FX in my monitor, even if I have the dry signal at unity, which means I have no idea what the actual FX level sounds like in the Main LR mix, and no way to fix it on the fly.
I prefer to use pre-fader sends for my monitor outputs, but switching them to post-fader doesn’t help either. If I boost a channel that's lower in the Main LR mix, I still get too little FX coming through in the monitor.
I know I could work around this by using insert mode instead of shared, but I want to send multiple channels to the same FX, so that doesn’t work for me.
I also thought about boosting the FX level in the monitor mix to compensate, but since I’m using the same FX unit for multiple channels, that doesn’t help either. If one channel’s Main LR fader is low, there’s no way to independently turn up that channel’s FX level in the monitor without affecting everything else. Plus, that would mean continually adjusting the FX return in the monitor mix to match the dry signal levels, which just isn’t practical, especially during a live performance.
What I’d really love is if the FX send level could follow the fader in each output’s individual mix, not just Main LR. That way, the FX-to-dry balance would stay consistent in the monitor mix, in Main LR, wherever – even if the Main LR fader for that channel is pulled down. I know some higher-end mixers can do this, so it would be amazing if the CQ could support it too, even just as a toggle option for more flexible control.
If this could be added in a firmware update, it would make a huge difference for those of us doing live performances without a dedicated sound engineer, as well as others who have found this to be an issue (links below).
Thanks again – the CQ series is fantastic overall.
