New QU or SQ, help me choose

Qu Qu General Discussions
1

Hi,
what would you do in my situation?

Its time to upgrade from my faithful QU16.

I am the engineer of a band that often requires 24-27 inputs, 8 aux mixes.
I have started to travel overseas with them but thats not often so at the moment traveling with the mixer on a plane isn’t a priority now, but it might be in the future. I have hired for this so far.

I also do the sound at a few festivals where 24-27 inputs, 8 auxes are generally the maximum i require.

For the above situations i have been hiring SQ mixers, mainly the SQ6 and GX4816
Having the GX4816 and SQ6 has been very handy for having the next band setup and ready to go sometimes at these festivals.

I have also mixed purely with the iPAD apps and used the QU16 or SQ6 as a stagebox though i want to stop doing this if possible.

I have the budget for either the new QU’s or SQ’s.

I love the upgrades to the new QU’s including feedback and gain assistant.
Not that this is a priority, but that would be handy for fast band change overs at festivals.

The idea of 32 faders with the QU7 or SQ7 and having the whole band / DCA’s / FX sends on one layer is attractive.( I see lots of top sound engineers still only using analogue desks for big bands, so everything is on the surface at all times for them.)
With the SQ6 i generally have had the important musicians/DCA’s/FX sends on 1 layer and less important musicians like BV’s on another layer, i don’t mind using multiple layers.
With QU5/6/7 having monochrome scribble strips i like the idea of having the whole band on one layer like an analogue mixer, as i find having coloured scribble strips is helpful with multiple layers.

If i don’t buy very soon, within the next 3 months i would have spent £400-£600 on hiring a SQ6 + GX4816, i normally spend around £800-£1000 per year on this.

BUT!!! what about waiting a year (maybe 2 or 3 years?!) for the new SQ’s? i am sure A&H will update the SQ’s as they are so popular like the QU range.
The idea of what A&H would do to the SQ’s like a 10 inch touch screen, included DEEP plugins(i wish :)), more than 6 characters on the scribble strips, feedback, gain assistant, for example makes me think i could/should wait and carry on hiring and wait to see what the new SQ’s will be like?

IF i had the budget, Avantis solo, or DLive C1500 would be what i’d be looking at. Maybe one day.
I’d appreciate any ideas on this.
Many thanks.

2

No advice but rather another consideration: SQ might be easier to get a hold of when renting.

Good luck !

Giga

3

The whole SQ range has 48 mix channels (40 mono, 4 stereo) selected from upto 128, whereas the QU7 has less than that (I’m not sure what the new QU7 limits are). While both these are more than your normal max having a few more spare can save the day.

4

Don’t be mad at me, but since this might be a matter of decision-making, the following should be corrected accordingly:

I’m sure you mean input channels, but you can freely choose whether you want to use the maximum possible as 48 mono channels or but also up to 24 stereo channels.

And in addition to the local inputs, you have 128 SLInk, 32 USB, and 128 additional sources available via the I/O port.
So, an SQ-5/6/7 has a maximum of 311/319/327 selectable “input sockets”.

5

I have no “insider” knowledge, but I can’t imagine A&H updating the SQ hardware in the next year or two. I say this for two reasons. First, there isn’t much in the way of hardware that needs to be changed IMHO. Second, they just released the SQ Rack. If there was going to be a major hardware change in the near future, I doubt they would have released the SQ Rack when they did. They would have waited and released it with the new hardware changes.

I think A&H updated the QU series to bring their entire console lineup under the same 96kHz XCVI processing design. Doing so also allowed them to add a lot of features that simply weren’t available on the QU Classic, so it really was a win-win situation.

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