[AlecParticipant]

Fully agree. Not too fussed how it’s achieved – personally, I’d be happy with any of the approaches mentioned above.

[AlecParticipant]

I’ll be direct, a year of SQ use under my belt, and I’m really disappointed by SQ’s scribble strips.

The 6 character limit is woeful, and the legibility (particularly of red and blue) is poor.

It’s crying out for a component change, which could improve legibility. It’s a shame that A&H appear to have cut corners on the scribble strip.

And the decision to limit to 6 characters is unfathomable. What mystifies me is that even DLive appears to have a 6 character limit. Blimey!

[AlecParticipant]

Indeed, Hugh, that’s a way round it where it’s always the MC mic.

Having said that, it’s not uncommon in the house PA guy world to have random needs to un-mute unexpected single channels. It was a piece of cake with the old X32, but is one of the small number of irritations with SQ.

[AlecParticipant]

Edoardo & Dave’s workarounds are still kludgy:

Ganging is nowhere near as neat as stereo linking for inputs – and also doesn’t fold the two inputs onto a single fader. And you can’t use an insert effect across ganged channels.

Surely, most people running a multi-band night use a scene per band, rather than a show per band? With SQ’s retarded limit of one show on board, and needing additional shows to be stored on USB drives, I’d never want to trust an external USB drive for a band changeover.

Dedicating certain channels to be stereo linked just doesn’t work in a busy venue with multiple engineers, let alone coping with visiting bands who will often just come with their own scene.

Nottooloud hits the nail on the head with just wanting to “Recall the house default scene and go to work” – exactly what I want.

While it’s frustrating that the architecture requires the reboot of the core, I can live with that. I’d far rather have the option of a full scene recall with a brief interruption, than to maintain audio at all costs, regardless of utility. My suggestions in the first post look like they could be workable, giving the best of both worlds, and surely not incredibly difficult to implement?

[AlecParticipant]

But that it how it works – showing channel names, isn’t it?

I don’t have the mixer beside me right now, but in SQPad, FX inserts and I/O channels display names, not numbers. As far as I can see from the manual, there isn’t an option to choose between channel number and channel name. Nor does it appear that this was a feature introduced in a firmware update.

Or is this another of those infuriating cases of where the interface behaves differently depending on the platform you’re on (SQ / Mixpad Windows / Mixpad Android)?

[AlecParticipant]

The discussion about the kick mic overloading reminds me of an oddity in the default settings for SQ where pre-amp gains are all set to something line 20db of gain (can’t remember the exact amount, as I don’t have the desk in front of me), rather than being set at minimum levels.

This caught me out a few times with higher level inputs. I very quickly set all gains in my personal blank default scene to 0.

No pad needed, but definitely less gain!

[AlecParticipant]

Someone recently told me it’s bad to turn off the SQ boards regularly.

Some people can be just plain wrong.

From A&H’s spec sheet the max power consumption of the SQ5 is 75w, which is 655kWh per year.

In the UK, at least, the current domestic price cap for electricity is 52 p/kWh, which equates to UKP 340 per year – probably higher on a commercial tarrif. That alone, on both a financial and an environmental basis, should tell you that with your usage the right thing to do is to power the mixer down in between each event.

[AlecParticipant]

+1

Coming from X32, I always thought their scribble strips were pretty lame.

Coming to SQ, pretty much everything about the scribble strips is poor. 6 character limit, tiny – and, most of all, prettly illegible. If there’s one job they’re meant to do, it’s be legible and, especially red, really isn’t.

Sadly, most of this needs an engineering change to improve.

[AlecParticipant]

+1

[AlecParticipant]

the Status of “DCA Spill on Select” should be a switch somewhere in the Console Setup so one can permanently activate it without wasting a Soft Key

Absolutely! I spent ages looking for this switch before it eventually dawned on me that it wasn’t available in setup. It’s quite bizarre and counter-intuitive to have a setting that’s configurable only via a softkey.

As well it should be possible to activate DCA Spill on Select in the App

Indeed. Presumably, if the setting above was implemented, then it’d follow into the app.

Should be possible to do that by first selecting a DCA Master and then hold the “Assign” Button. In that case, the layer assignments could temporarily switch back to layer mode as long as the Button is held and allow to use “Select” Buttons to change Membership to the selected DCA. It should also be possible to jump to all layers while doing that and to select Bus Masters as DCA Members by pressing their Master Button.

This is a method familiar to X32 users, and is quite intuitive. In my early days with SQ, I could never find the DCA assigment section in a hurry. It’s much more obvious now, and quite quick to use. But the process of using the Select key would still be perfectly reasonable. Even more helpfully, it could display the DCA Assign window while this was in operation.

[AlecParticipant]

Agreed – as a new SQ user, the 6 character limit is unbelievably useless.

[AlecParticipant]

Late to the game, but an absolute +1 from me.

An expander is such an easy option to add in the gate section and *so* much better to use in most of my applications.

Not holding out too much hope, given nothing’s happened by now. But go on, A&H, don’t be shamed by Behringer on this one…

[AlecParticipant]

Android – poor performance? So, you’ve never used a Nexus 7/10, then? They’re completely up for the job!

Diversity of hardware? Well, maybe, but it doesn’t stop most apps! And it’s hardly like the i* environment doesn’t add a new device every few months, changing things like screen size/resolution.

Bottom line is, plenty of people will have Android devices for all sorts of reasons, and it would be great if they could be enfranchised with an Android app.

[Author]

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