virtual soundcheck

[Steven18]

hello everyone, I have just ordered the CQ20-b I should receive it during the pro week, I am very excited, I already have a qu-pac, which I find wonderful. Is there a virtual sound check function in the CQ20-B? I’m going to use the CQ20-B when we’re doing a small stage, where there isn’t a lot of space and time is short…. the virtual soundcheck function would be a real time saver. thank you all and long live Allen & Heath!!!

[Anonymous]

Yes. You can play multi-tracks back through each channel to form a virtual sound check. You can do this either by playing back multi-tracks that the CQ has recorded to the SD card or can hook up a DAW via USB cable and route DAW channels to each channel on the CQ. In either event you have to go to the inputs section of each channel and change it from pre-amp to USB/SD. When it’s time for the show, go back to the inputs and change them back to the preamp setting. You can probably set a scene to do this change, I haven’t tried it yet.

On a side note, I have not been successful in copying WAV files (from computer) to the SD card and playing them back as multi-tracks on the CQ. Instead, I connected USB cable between my Mac and CQ and played back my multi-tracks that way. I was able to record to SD at the same time so could subsequently could play those back from SD. I ready someone else who had been able to simply copy WAV files directly on to the SD card but that didn’t work for me; even when I had the same folder structure, file names, and sample rate as what the CQ does itself.

[Steven18]

hello Mfusa , thx you very much , i try this !

[glenndincnj]

In the manual, it tells you what is stored in the mixer itself, in a show, and in a scene. There first thing listed for what is stored in a scene is Input Source. So the suggestion that mfusa made by being able to do a quick switch over via scene should work.

[Shakes]

Just bare in mind re virtual sound check.
If you’re in a small space, there will be an acoustic contribution from musicians actually being on stage so what sounds good from a playback perspective may not sound so great live.

[bullmoon]

For copying files to the card, make sure they are plain WAV files, for example the “Broadcast Wave” file format will not work and once the files are in that format, it’s hard to change – at least I was not able to. I recreated the WAV files with the BWAVE option off and then worked fine.

[PH]

@mfusa

I’m also having trouble copying over WAV files on CQ-20B – there seems to be some issue that seems to disable any playback/recording to the SD card when it sees something it doesn’t like. All are plain WAV files, recorded at the same sample rate, etc.

Also, I’m not able to do your workaround like you suggest – playback through a DAW and record to the SD. Whenever I have an SD inserted, I can’t get anything to play via the DAW (no signal). I have to remove the SD and reboot the mixer for the DAW to work again.

What size SD are you using?

[Anonymous]

@PH sorry for the delay. I have a SanDisk Ultra Class 10 128GB SD card. Yes, it’s higher than the 32GB that is listed as supported but it seems to work so long as I record to it from the CQ and playback on the CQ.

[BruceOrl]

In case you missed it, Keith posted a formatting guide (and a link to a more in depth look) in his post here:

https://community.allen-heath.com/forums/topic/background-tracks-from-sd#post-116225

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