Installed 2 Qu32s. Very happy.

[danthedeckieParticipant]

Hi guys,

Just thought I’d say Hi. We’ve just installed 2 Qu32s on board our ship, the M/V Logos Hope ( https://www.logoshope.org ). It’s run by a Christian charity, goes around the world doing a lot of educational programs, conferences, training, concerts, and other events (as well as being the world’s largest floating book-shop, doing a lot of aid and development work, etc.) We have 2 venues on board, a 400 seat theatre, and a 350 seat conference venue.

We did have 2 LS9-32s in there, but they were getting quite old now, had many many broken faders, occasionally locked up (twice during shows…), and it was a lot easier, and possibly cheaper to buy 2 new Qu32 desks, and ship them out than to send back the LS9s for servicing.

The sound-operators are all volunteers, currently none of them have any prior experience doing live sound, other than the training I was able to give them, and the experience they’ve had on board. (A couple of them running sound there every day for about a year…).

They all *love* the Qu32, and I found it incredibly easy to teach. It was practically a drop-in replacement (OK, some re-soldering connector types, but that was easy enough…). Only a few minor changes to how we do things, but none of them massively significant.

The Qu32 is definitely much more limited than the LS9 – you can’t patch signals all over the place in the same way; you don’t have as many patchable outputs; vastly less effects; fixed numbers of mixes; slightly less control over the graphical EQ; etc.

However, we found that 95% or more of how we’d configured our LS9s was exactly how the Qu32 comes already, and everything is labelled intuitively, rather than everything being an ‘OMNI8’, ‘MIX7/8’ or whatever.

Over all, we’re very happy. The Qu32 is a very nice desk. Very easy to teach (it’s the first digital desk I’ve taught that I think might actually be easier to teach than an a big analogue desk). It does everything we hoped it would, and we’d recommend it for anyone thinking about installing a new sound system of around that size (unless they actually have reason to go up to a GLD, or more complex system). I’ve worked with other cheap digital desks (Behringer X32, Yamahas, etc), and have plenty of experience with bigger digital desks (LS9, M7CL, etc), as well as years working with medium / large format analogue systems, and so far the Qu32 is my favourite. It’s just so simple. I really look forward to trying out more of A&H’s more powerful digital desks whenever I get a chance.

If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer. 🙂

Dan

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