Wondering if we could get a post eq/comp insert option maybe even toggle between pre and post?. I’d rather use multiband/desesser/dyneq after eq compression.
Yes, that would be nice. As workaround I am sending a channel to a group and insert there one of dynamic trio addons.
+1
This would be incredibly useful. Both for signal flow and also for the ability to send every channel through a Waves rack (keeping phase coherency) and still having an insert slot available for hardware or FX units etc.
for a second insert you have to buy an Avantis or dLive
if the SQ gets all the features from the expensive desks then I will ask why I have to pay that much for them
@SteffenR
I suspect that AH would love to give you fancy features that the competition has but only if AH does not have more expensive devices that already have them.
Wait for a 3rd party to deliver the goods and become dominant in the industry if the others dont change fast.
The more interesting question is are all the OEMs colluding on prices and features so they all make more profit?
Dont know cant say, but always something to consider with most industries.
Makes no sense to me, to not integrate a second insert, just because that’s a feature of the more expensive consoles. A&H should just design the best product for every given hardware. If you have to spend 5x more for a Dlive, just because you want that extra insert, then A&H is no longer a company which products I would want to use. If a second insert is not possible due to DSP limitations, than that’s fine. But an additional insert should consume almost no DSP, so I don’t see why you wouldn’t implement that. Makes the console so much more valuable and competitive with the recently released competition.
the console has no real DSP
What is that supposed to mean? It’s a digital mixing console, of course it does Digital Signal Processing.
DSP— digital signal processor
Or “…Processing“…
Whatever, I think my post was pretty clearly formulated, even if an FGPA is technically no DSP-processor. Fact is, it does some digital signal processing. And if the implementation or power of the FGPA used in the SQ-series is not powerful enough to run a second insert, then well thats how it is. If it IS able to do it, and the argument to not implement it is: “I want my more expensive console to have more inserts than your cheaper one”, then I say that’s a bad argument and such a mentality leads to inferior products and in the end to an inferior company as a whole. A company should always strive to make each product as good as possible and as good as the development costs allow.
Many manufacturers use off-the-shelf DSP chips, and there are plenty of mixers which are re-branded OEM units and some which use re-housed technology, but none of this applies to any A&H product.
The XCVI core as used in SQ/Avantis/dLive is carrying out digital signal processing, but uses FPGA technology rather than multiple DSP chips (which is what Steffen was getting at).
The different ‘sizes’ of XCVI core in each of these ranges is due to different hardware - we build the architecture from scratch to contain all the channels, routing and processing for the model.
It can be thought of as similar to multiple DSP chips, all of our own design, running highly efficient algorithms and with none of the issues or timing weirdness that can be caused when they to talk to each other.
So the processing and mixing algorithms that each of the ranges actually use are the same, but with varying numbers of channels, available routing/processing for those channels and different extra processing engines.
A good example is with the DEEP/DYN engines (the DYN engine runs the DYN-8 processor) - The dLive has both, the SQ has the DEEP engine but not the DYN engine and the Avantis features DEEP and a slightly smaller DYN engine.
So we are not picking from a pool of available DSP, where the next feature is simply appended. The foundations of the XCVI design are the routing and allocated processing, and this is what dictates the capabilities of each model.
We definitely aim to provide the best product with the given hardware, which is exactly what this part of the digital community is about.
Adding one feature will take up processing resources that could be used for another, it will also use developer time that could be spent working on something else.
All we want to do is try to make sure we make the most of the hardware and available development time by implementing features that satisfy the most number of users 
Apologies for hijacking! Just wanted to try and clear up the confusion as I’ve seen it elsewhere too.
Keith.
For me there must be enough processing power for eight effects in the FX rack available. So, what is the difference of using that eight effects on eight differen channels or using two of them on one channel?
And some words on how much features of the upper class consoles can be done for the SQ. Back in those medieval days of personal computers IBM decided not to use a 386 processor for their AT Pc platform to not harm the business of their midrange computers with not more power as the 386 provides that days.
That leads to a situation that a small company named Compaq grows to a big player on that market because they have no reason to protect other product series of their company.
We are here in a similar situation. Steffen says that those features should not be part of the SQ series. You rather have to buy the Avantis or the dLive.
While money is always something you have to consider, there are still other reasons not to use those big consoles. The footprint, an SQ is a lightweight console compared to the upper class models. I own a dLive compact series as well as a SQ because I have use cases I want to use the one or the other (or both). So for me I would love to have a small version of the dLive in the case of the SQ with same flexibility, processing capabilities but with more or less the same amount busses and channels as the SQ has nowadays. That means less channels but the same comfort as on the big dLive. And of course the scenes and shows should be interchangeable.
Generating a full interchangeable ecosystem would be a big step into the right direction. At the moment there are too much pitfalls for using different series together. Different audio protocolls, remote control protocolls, show and scene data formats and so on.
But I am just dreaming…
Steffen says that those features should not be part of the SQ series.
that’s not what I say… if A&H can manage it to implement so… but I was trying to say that the SQ is more a budget version of the upper class consoles
and that there must be a reason (as Keith confirmed) that there is only one insert point available
and there are reasons that not all features are possible to implement
Generating a full interchangeable ecosystem would be a big step into the right direction.
this will not that easy to do
the difference between the dLive and the SQ are way to big to do this the easy way…
but could be easier with dLive and Avantis
maybe we can think about what we really need
but this should go to a separate thread
and since this is related to all systems we have no dedicated place to discuss this…
@Mfk0815
waiting for your suggestions where we want to discuss this
dLive feature suggestions forum?
It has been a long time since I tested computer gear for a 3letter computer company but my recollection is that FPGAs, which were rather new back then, are way short of the processing ability of DSP chips.
I would expect FPGAs to provide logic to glue DSPs together not try to replace them.
you are confused and very naive about how the real world works.
Nobody designs to the hardware whatever that means. They design to the marketplace.
That is why there are so many AH products not just one.
If people do not buy the products they would go out of business.
And constraining them are many factors including the competition and the cost of building the hardware with yet another feature.
Products have to come in rather large discrete lumps of capability.
It is not feasible to have no apparent gaps between models in a line.
Sometimes you might get lucky and find exactly what you need from a competitor.
But almost always you are trading off your wishes vs what is offered by all the items in the marketplace.
While also considering price, reliability, service, and many other NFRs.
It has been a long time since I tested computer gear for a 3letter computer company but my recollection is that FPGAs, which were rather new back then, are way short of the processing ability of DSP chips.
I would expect FPGAs to provide logic to glue DSPs together not try to replace them.
and again… you are really not up to date…
the DigiCo systems use FPGA’s since 10 years now
RME interfaces use FPGA since 1997 I think… when the first Fireface came out…
Linus Torvald worked at a company where he designed virtual CPU’s for average use running on FPGA hardware
Xilinx Spartan changed the game completely
Well we’re getting very off-topic now, but let me just clear up my standpoint:
My argument was, that restricting software artificially, capping it so to speak, although the hardware underlying it could do more, is bad software design. You can see this for example in Pro Tools: capping the amount of available channels, even though my computer could handle more is just annoying and stupid. It’s bad software design. And yes I’m aware, that Pro Tools is the dominant DAW, but it’s the dominant DAW despite their design choices, not because of it. Companies that design good software are never doing this kind of stuff.
Now I’m not saying A&H are doing this, they are obviously improving their desks constantly and trying to get the most out of it. The points Keith mentioned (available computing power, that could be used elsewhere in the system / available engineering resources) make a lot of sense. That’s why these forums exist, so that the development team can find out which features should get priority. I just wanted to reply to Steffen’s point that you should cap the SQ’s capabilities, to not harm the sales of dLive consoles. This is just a flawed argument (which he retracted a few posts earlier). In a capitalistic world, the best and cheapest product sells the most. If A&H could sell the dLive for half the price, they would sell like hot cakes. So making the SQ5 more capable makes a lot of sense, since they have a better product, which will then sell more.
But I think the point of this thread is to find out if users would want this feature. I for my part have this feature in the top 3 wishes for my SQ, along with:
- FX sends usable with external effects, which would free up the first 4 fx slots for different stuff.
- Dual Mono FX
But that belongs in a different thread, I know
Have a good one everybody!
you are still confused as can be about how the real world works
ever buy a car?
see all the fancy features they could have put in the cheapest model but did not
just to get folks to buy more expensive cars to get those features
and features have nothing to do with software DESIGN
first you have to ARCHITECT the product
Then Systems Engineers do the DESIGN
finally software clowns code the software per the specs of the design
and it is not about selling the most devices
it is all about making the most profit in the long run
and making a product ‘better’ (your opinion) to sell more
may not sell enough more more to be worth the expense
remember using that money to make one product ‘better’
takes away from resources from doing another product that would make more profit to keep AH in business longer
as to ‘pro’ tool, they are a leading DAW by being early and using the word ‘pro’ in the title
there are other better DAWs competing against them quite well
one studio showed the protool screen on a pc but never used it at all
they used another better DAW but only showed the pro tool logo because customers were stupid
and thought that meant better results
Yeah maybe the “real world” doesn’t do it right all the time. I’m perfectly aware that artificially limiting your product is practiced in a lot of companies. In software it’s the easiest to do. But as you mentioned, you could also build two cars with same engine and artificially limit one of the cars to a certain power output of said engine. Now just because companies do this, doesn’t make it good practice. As somebody mentioned earlier, it leaves room for competitors to implement these functions at a lower price point (see Behringer) and it pisses customers off. If I would buy a car, that doesn’t allow me to use the full power of its engine, just to sell the same thing without limitations more expensive, I would be mad (or never buy from that company in the first place).
To take my argument further for argument’s sake: If the SQ-range had the same processing capabilities as the dLive-range, but would be artificially limited (which it is not, again it’s just an imaginative scenario), I would never buy A&H, cause I would feel ripped off. I actually do feel ripped off concerning the DEEP plugin bundles for the SQ series, which are waaaaay to expensive for what they are. Again A&H might make more money with that decision in the short term, but in the long term this devalues their brand name in my opinion. Engineers that walk to an SQ desk, don’t know what to expect. Does this specific desk have a De-esser or not?, does it have Compressor-emulations or not?, where is that BBD FX, that I used the last time I mixed on an SQ?, etc. etc. In my opinion this makes their product worse. If I would have designed the console, I would have priced it 200.- dollars higher, and included the DEEP plugins in every console. But that’s not my decision to make, just my opinion to voice. You can call this “that’s how the real world works”, I call it a bad business decision and lot of other companies agree with my opinion, as they did not go for the add-on business-model.
But hey, difference of opinions are fine. I understand where you are coming from, I just don’t agree.