QU 16 – Opinions after 14 months – The Good

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I’ve been using a QU 16 in church for about 14 months, to mix a 2 hour church service every Sunday.

THE GOOD.

Superb looking mixer. nice layout. No complaints about the quality of preamps – Garbage in Garbage out, it has no influence on the quality of the audio i.e in my opinion very transparent preamps – if something is not sounding quite right, the problem is likely to be from your mixing decision or from the source, or speakers.

As a digital mixer, the sends to Mix Outputs on faders, is a nice touch. Comprehensive set of basic processing for all channels, and all outputs (L/R and Mix outs)

Being able to store settings is fantastic, and have a fallback to prior week’s settings, is a relief, just in case a volunteer really messed things up.

Being able to have different levels of users, and some of them restricted from making changes to the processing, is fantastic. It’s nice to be able to restrict the volunteers to only faders. Fantastic. cos for most purposes, if the processing on each channel is setup reasonably well, the only thing that needs changing most of the time are adjustments to levels, via the faders. I have not yet used this feature, since I am the one mixing at the desk most of the time, and I prefer access to everything !, but for less experienced/knowledgeable volunteers/audio engineers, this is a life saver, to protect them from doing anything terrible!

The custom layer is wonderful, so it does not matter, what the input configuration is, you have a way to logically remap that to something more sensible. Ideally though, the inputs should also be logically laid out.

Being able to restrict the layers to only the custom layer is fantastic – presenting only the most important faders, to the mixing engineer, is also a nice touch.

The faders feel really great, move very smoothly, and the recall as you switch between different Mix Outputs is very quick, pretty much instant.

I had wanted to put the Good, Bad and Ugly in one post, but I’ll split them up, to avoid this becoming another War and Peace (aka too long to read, for some)

Having a signal generator is great. Fantastic…

For a typical mix – of a small or even a large band, it’s got all that I need. Graphic EQ on fader flip. Not bad.. very impressive, dazzles those around me, as I flip the graphic EQ faders in and out and the moving faders change position. I happen to be the only one there who understands all this, so it must look like magic to those around me in church. – What the hell is this man doing?, almost feels like running a spaceship – via faders.

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