Thunderbolt 3 card for SQ mixers

[Keyguy]

With so many systems now supporting thunderbolt 3 ports why doesn’t Allen Heath provide a Thunderbolt 3 card and ASIO driver for interfacing DAW’s. I run a Intel I9 system with Thunderbolt 3 and Reaper and Studio One as my main Daws.
It would be so great to be able to use my SQ board as a direct interface for recording and running VSTI’s for live gigs. Right now I use a Presonus Quantum 2626 to output audio into the SQ board but a direct Thunderbolt 3 card would provide a fast and powerful solution for many of us. I believe it would be a smart move for Allen Heath to make as Thunderbolt is becoming a widespread protocol.

[Showtime]

You can do more with a dante interface.

The benefit of dante is that it is nog pear to pear bu network based.

The marked for tb3 is smaler so the cost of a card higher.

[Keyguy]

The Market for Thunderbolt is smaller than Dante??????
Do you have any idea how many current systems on the market now come with Thunderbolt 3. It’s a hell of a lot more than all the Dante cards in service.
I used to own a pcie Dante card, and although the routing capabilities are outstanding it’s latency was slower than my RME madi card which has outstanding low latency performance. My Presounus Quantum 2626 also has outstanding low latency performance over thunderbolt 3. I also use a UAD Apollo Solo over thunderbolt 3 and although not quite a fast as the Presonus it’s quite good.
Anyway I was trying to point out that there’s a large and soon to be huge market for interfaces offering Thunderbolt 3 and it’s generally a different market from Dante and Madi. Think home studios.

[Keyguy]

Allen heath. You are missing a huge market segment by not providing a Thunderbolt card for the SQ series.
Dante though nice for large systems that need extensive routing does not provide the low latency modern recording systems require with today’s DAW’s.
USB is way past its prime and can’t provide real-time monitoring with on board plugins from a DAW.
Please examine this very real need from many of your current and future customers.
I can only dream of incorporating my SQ6 and Reaper over Thunderbolt 3 or 4 and the productive workflow along with the sonic excellence we users would experience.

[nottooloud]

The marked for tb3 is smaler so the cost of a card higher.

Dante licensing and their proprietary chips are crazy expensive. Also nearly unavailable. Even Yamaha can’t get them for the DM3.

[Rob T]

What’s the advantage to Thunderbolt here vs the USB that’s already built into the console? 32×32 channels at 96k/24bit fits into the data rate limits for USB 2 (which are roughly 70 channels of 96k/24bit audio), and bumping up to USB 3 would allow for more channels of I/O than the SQ series supports. And that’s without getting into the higher speeds that you can get with Thunderbolt.

[nottooloud]

roughly 70 channels of 96k/24bit audio

I wonder why they limited it to 32 channels? I sometimes want more, but not enough to drop $1k on a Dante card.

@Keithjah?

[tutu13]

To use plug-ins from my DAW plug-ins on channels of my SQ (bit crusher, guitar, amplifier, dynamic filter, manipulator, auto tune), would the round trip be faster with a Thunderbolt3 card than with ‘Dante + RME digiface’ ($2300) ?

[Author]

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