First I want so say hello from germany to all here in the forum and to A&H.
I do music just as a hobbyist and never had a product from A&H before. But yesterday, I got my CQ-20B. My first impressions, primarily as an interface were very good. All worked fine so far, both as an interface with the ASIO-driver in my DAW (Cubase) and as a “soundcard” under Windows 11. The function as a classic mixer/stagebox will be tested soon too. The sound quality is very good in my ears, also the effects were very clear and impressed me really. I had two Behringer XR-18 in the past and because of this I have some simple suggestions for future updates for the CQ MixPad-software, that passed through my mind after doing my first steps with the CQ-20B. That were:
– simple more colors for the channels (now only 7 available)
– perhaps a fader for the phones volume on the output-tab. Now you have first to go back to config, outputs and choose the phone to adjust the volume
– only show knobs and buttons fit to the connected mixer. As written above, I had an CQ-20B and there aren’t any soft keys, but they are shown in the MixPad-software on the left side. Of course I cannot select them, so why are they visible?
– more routing options to be more flexible (not so important for me, but perhaps for others). In the XR-18 you can route the signal very flexible to any outputs, for example input 1 is routed to channel 6 (you can control it with fader 6). I know this can cause confusion, but it allows flexible configurations for different situations.
One annotation, the performance meter in Cubase jumps very often from left to right and back. It seems the former ASIO-driver from the XR18 was much calmer (hope you understand what I mean). I know the CQ-series are brand new, so I hope of future updates for the software, firmware and drivers to make it better and better.
Now I am looking forward to go on with my tests the next days.
Thank you very much for this piece of gear.
Kind regards,
Timo
.
