It has been a while – but we bought an SQ7 in the end and we have been using it now for over a year.
We ended up identifying a few limitations (when compared to our LS9-32) mainly in the area of the number of MIX busses and MATRIX outputs. However, we managed to reconfigure the SQ7 to minimise these.
The SQ7 is pretty beautiful in operation though – and it sounds amazing (again, compared to the LS9).
I had not deliberately stated that the SQ7 would ‘sound’ that different – just to manage expectations. However, I did a ‘lash up’ one day before we went ‘live’ when I grabbed a couple of musicians and vocalists during the daytime – and we were all impressed by the drastic sound improvement…
Anyhow, please find a list of things that either I can’t find in the manual (or don’t exist in the firmware). We are currently using firmware 1.5.0 (I think):
1. Is there a way of WRITE PROTECTING scenes?
We have setup some users (Admin, AVTEAM, GUEST, …) and limited the range of scenes they can use, but on the LS9 we could deliberately WRITE PROTECT a scene to prevent an accidental overwrite. OK, it could easily be undone and overwritten, but that would have taken a deliberate act by someone who is trusted.
2. We have a reverb effect as an insert in our vocal group. More advanced users are happy to go off to the effects pages and adjust the reverb wet setting. Novices not… We tried to map the reverb wet parameter onto a user rotary control but this does not appear to be an option! Any thoughts?
3. It would appear as though layer ‘A’ is automatically selected on a power-up. Is there any way of making another layer the default? I would have expected this configuration item to either be a function of the surface set-up or held in a scene.
We have had to reduce the number of fold-backs by one – but the next phase is to find money for a few ME-1 personal mixers – and this will release some AUX channels. We have fully used the MIX (GROUP/AUX) and MATRIX busses. We have 1 or 2 spare outputs and 8 (or so) spare inputs on the standard desk complement of I/O.
Dave
