CQ-20B / various feature suggestions

[TomCParticipant]

Hi, long-time musician and audiovisual professional here, have been making my first foray into digital mixing as an early adopter of the CQ-20B. On the whole, absolutely loving the product and have been using it in varied scenarios from band gigs to setting it up as a talkback system for multicamera shoots. Based on the first few months of use, here are a few development ideas & feature requests for future updates:

– A crucial feature (which has already been requested by others) would be to add the possibility to send channels to outputs 1-6 post-compressor. The lack of this feature somewhat hinders the usability of the mixer e.g. in a situation where it’s being used as an onstage intermediate mixer and FX unit for combining several instruments for sending to the house sound engineer. Also, having the choice to keep the channel compressor operational would actually be also useful for when the outputs are used for stage monitoring.

– Please make the multitrack or stereo recording indicator(s) _significantly_ more visible when recording is activated, i.e. a bright red bar at the top of the screen or something similar! I had to find out the hard way that if you forget to stop the recording before switching off the mixer you will have a bunch of corrupted and unusable files on the SD card…

– Another UI issue that could potentially cause grief is that upon formatting the external USB disk, the system does warn that there is data on the disk, but it would be good if it also explicitly mentioned if there is show data on the drive that is about to be erased. It’s easy to forget about this if you are only thinking of erasing the USB drive for recording purposes.

– More colour options on the channels would be nice. Also, a small inconsistency in the UI – on the Outputs tab of the Config view, the outputs have the button called Name/Colour but you can’t actually select a colour. Colours would be useful for the outputs too, or otherwise this could just be called Name.

– The 6-character naming limit is a bit cumbersome for the channels, I understand that there is a space limit graphically but one or two letters more would be useful.

– As a small detail, the default naming of the channels (Ip1…) is somehow confusing as I keep reading it as a lowercase “LP”. Maybe IN1, IN2, IN3 etc. would be clearer?

– The soft keys don’t seem to work when assigned to multitrack or stereo recording functions, or am I missing something?

– And another minor UI detail, the In/Out indicator/buttons in the channel processing are a bit unclear as it’s not immediately obvious whether e.g. “Out” refers to the current status of the gate/PEQ etc. or if it’s the button that you need to press in order to take the effect out of the chain. Perhaps these controls could be redesigned as virtual toggle switches that clearly show whether the setting is currently IN or OUT?

– On the main screen of the app (before logging into the unit) it could be clearer what the status of the Wifi connection is. At the moment it feels a bit unclear whether one should press the refresh button, Other, or just wait for the unit to show up on the list. Eventually it always does appear and so far the connection has been rock solid but this is the one point that always feels a bit unsure when booting up the unit for the evening’s gig.

But on the whole excellent work and looking forward to getting a lot of use out of this thing!

[Highflyer1953Participant]

Of your points, the more colours and more than six characters are highly unlikely as this is the same on all A&H digital mixers, at least up to Avantis (not used DLive so can’t comment, but believe it is the same) so it will take a whole change of the way they design the displays!

[TomCParticipant]

OK! Anyway, that’s quite a minor detail anyway.

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