After many years enjoying the “X32 family” and in particular, using the X32 rack for many different purposes, I’ve been disappointed that similar things can’t be achieved in the AH family. With the announcement of the SQ Rack I’m very much hoping that it can be used as a Stagebox for other SQ mixers. Can anyone confirm this?
Thanks
You cannot connect a second console and expect it to work like a stage box and not like a second console - it will always act as a second console. However you can connect two SQ consoles together and share I/O. The biggest take away is the fact that the console with the physical I/O will be the console that will control the preamp settings (like gain, polarity, phantom power, etc). You’ll also need to make sure your routing is correctly set up to pass any of the I/O to the other system.
In practical terms, you’ll need an available SLink port on both SQ consoles to connect them together. Alternatively, if both consoles have matching I/O expansion cards (both have Dante, or both have Waves, or both have Madi) you can connect them that way.
Thanks. I’ll probably get one when they start shipping but with no preamp control, it will be pretty clumsy as a stage box. I need/want flexibility in my inventory. I’ve found that the X32 rack is pretty awesome as a swiss army knife and I bought them instead of stageboxes. A stagebox is useless in any other role but a mixer like this can do all kinds of things when it’s not needed as a stagebox.
Just to be clear… it’s not that there isn’t any preamp control, it is just that each console will control the preamps for their local analog inputs. For example, you won’t be able to control the preamps of the analog inputs on a SQ Rack from an SQ5 for example. You will have to set/control preamps for the local inputs of the SQ Rack on the SQ Rack, and the preamp settings of the local inputs of the SQ5 on the SQ5.
I suspect this is exactly the way the X32 Rack preamps worked when connected to another X32. Each console is responsible for the preamp control of their local analog inputs.
Furthermore, there will be a digital trim setting available on every source on every console. So while you can’t control the local preamp gain for inputs on the SQ Rack (on stage) from a SQ5 at FOH, you will have a digital trim knob on the SQ5 that you can use to adjust the local gain of the inputs coming over from the SQ Rack. The digital trim setting provides +/- 24db of gain.
An Option to “link” preamps between the two consoles could be a nice feature here. So the console not “owning” the input could control the input gain by remote-controlling the one “owning” it. Would make working together a little easier in FoH/Mon Setups.
Another nice thing would be the possibility to use a rack console not only as a stagebox but also as a “hot standby” for the desk so in case of a FoH or multicore outage the complete Show setup can be switched seamlessly to the rack console (which might be controlled via WLAN and an App from FoH in that case).
Most technicians do major adjusting of console controls in rehearsals and while sound check and the work while the “productive” performance is mainly reduced to switching scenes, mute/unmute and volume adjustments. Those functions are easily available on rack Mixers via the remote Apps. So such a “havary” switch from FoH Console to Rack on stage wouldn’t even be remarkable to the audience with good chances.
So all that is needed for this is configuring the rack model as “Stagebox and Slave of FoH and Fallback to local Master when SLINK disconnects”. Should not be too technical impossible. So all the FoH engineer has to do when his SQ5/6/7 breaks would be to plug off the slink to stage, open the Remote App for the Rack Mixer and continue the show.