Insert B

[volounteer]

@kirky

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.

[SteffenR]

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

[Kirky]

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!

[volounteer]

@kirky

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

[Kirky]

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.

[SteffenR]

– FX sends usable with external effects, which would free up the first 4 fx slots for different stuff.

sorry to pick this out… this makes no sense to me
the ressources for this would be better used on different tasks
you can send a mix to an external FX already and bring it back in with the input channels
I can’t see no advantage to mimic the FX rack for external FX
the only thing I could imagine is to get channels with no dynamics to save computation power for other tasks
but will that make big difference?

If 12 mixes 4 FX sends and 48 inputs are not enough then you own the wrong product

Dual Mono FX

this is a completely different beast

the handling for inserted FX in all A&H desks is suboptimal (except the Dyn8)
there is much room for improvement even on the dLive
Ever used a transient controller on Toms?
It takes always extra attention to make sure to use the right slot, not very intuitive
to avoid this confusion it is not possible to have dual mono FX at the moment on the SQ
but I’m sure the guys work on a solution

and regarding the insert B

I think there are more important things to do… like dual mono FX and proper insert handling inside the desk

[SteffenR]

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.

that could be true for the music scenario…
I know a company that needs 20 or 30 small format mixers for conferences
and they don’t need any extra plugins they are good with the desk alone
they would save a lot of money
the SQ could replace more expensive desks with ease and still compete with cheaper ones
and I doubt that the extra $200 would be enough
try to get the same functionality with Waves plugins… oh this adds latency…

[volounteer]

@SteffenR

I know they do use FPGAs.
Just do not believe that is for best performance but rather for easier changes to bugs and other NFRs.

You did get your other comments right.
Kirky is confused about what AH should do for him vs what AH needs to do to continue doing anything long term.

[Kirky]

I think there’s already another thread on that topic, so our discussion is not ideally placed here, but nevertheless:

1. I agree on the Dual Mono FX problem. It’s also not very well implemented on other consoles like X32 or yamaha’s. Especially on my QL1 I’m so often confused which channel’s insert I’m actually editing. But you get used to it and the benefits far outweigh those concerns. But yeah, an elegant solution would be great for sure.

2. concerning the first request: you said “the resources for this would be better used on different tasks”. You mean the resources to implement this? Seems to me a rather easy thing to implement, is it not? Just allow the FX sends to be routed to an output. Would just be great to use your preferred external FX (hardware, or Waves Rack, or whatever) with the dedicated FX sends, instead of using up 4 additional mixes and not have the FX sends in use for anything. As a bonus, you get to use the 4 FX slots for different stuff. One workaround could also be, to just add a mixknob to the FX (I think they might already have this, I forgot). This way you could run through the internal FX, but set them totally dry and send the return out to your external FX. Then return the external FX on a standard channel. Would work, but then you use the processing of 4 FX slots for basically nothing.

[volounteer]

@kirky

it may not need much to do but it is still competing against all the other things that could be done and need to be done

you assume that it would be easy. depends how good/badly AH did it the first time.
sometimes making other things easier initially makes changes like this harder now.

and they also have to way the demand&benefit of that change for a few/more? people, vs other things users want and what marketing says would help them sell more product so they can stay in business.

[Mike C]

@volounteer

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

Did you just really say that!!!!

I guess you forgot about all of your post complaining that your QU did not give you
all the “tools” you think you need to run sound in your church like “downward compression” and LUFS metering to name a few!

[SteffenR]

he is hitting others with our arguments now
already learned something 😉

[Author]

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