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2020/06/13 at 7:38 pm #92561
@bizbach, unfortunately, even the drive models that have been “tested by Allen & Heath” have proven to not work reliably for all users.
Allen and Heath continue to ignore this thread, and in my many hours on the phone with their tech support staff they’ve been unable to resolve this problem. The bottom line is, you might get lucky with a given USB drive, or you might not; there is no way to know except to try it, and even if you do try it, another drive of the exact same make and model might not work.
2020/03/18 at 9:19 am #90358***content removed – personal comment that does not contribute to the thread***
The simple fact here is: some of us have got Allen-Heath Qu boards whose USB ports *do not work*. This is not because of stupidity; it is not because of inexperience; it is not because of doing things wrong. It is because some of the boards are defective. This is not just my conclusion; it is the conclusion of the A-H tech that I spent hours on the phone with, over multiple days.
Listen, I’m happy for the 20% or 70% or 99.9% of people whose QuDrive ports work. Good on you! I wish I could be one! But your advice on how to make it work *does not work*, for my board.
2020/03/17 at 9:19 pm #90348@kevcarlson I wouldn’t get your hopes up. There are many of us on this thread who have tried firmware updates, tried multiple different USB sticks, tried multiple different ways of formatting the drives on Macs and PCs, and still are unable to get the Qu to recognize the USB stick.
As far as I can tell, it is a physical problem with the mixer itself, with some mixers being more prone than others. If you’re reading this thread, you’re one of the unlucky ones. A&H have been completely unresponsive and unable/unwilling to support.
2020/01/31 at 9:50 pm #89242@mikec and @xyz, as I’ve written in this thread previously, I’ve spent hours on the phone with A&H tech support walking me through every step, using freshly bought drives. I’ve got a SanDisk Ultra 32GB USB3.0 drive sitting in front of me right now, still sealed in its packaging. Would you like me to video what happens when I open it up and put it into my Qu16? I can guarantee you from long and painful experience and a lot of wasted money that it will not work; it will either fail to recognize the drive at all, or it will hang when it tries to format. (By “hang” I mean that I can come back two days later and it will still be no different.) Why this and not a Data Traveler? Because this drive was one that many people claimed was working for them.
This is a very long thread. I have read every post in it, many of them several times. The problem is *not* operator error. The problem appears to be that some Qu consoles are lemons and others are not. Volounteer and I both seem to have gotten lemons – as have many others posting in this thread.
2020/01/25 at 2:42 am #89042@mikec do you live anywhere close to Seattle? I’d really love to see if a drive that can be accessed by someone else’s Qu will work in mine. It seems like some people have better results than others and I wonder whether some of the mixers (like mine) are just lemons. I’ve tried lots of drives, never found a single one with more than 256MB (not GB) capacity that worked. I was able to back up scenes to the 256MB but it’s not much use for multitracking! And I can’t play music or SFX from other people’s thumb drives.
2020/01/01 at 1:09 am #88520@Dancing Brook – as @volounteer says, the issue here is in part that the Qu won’t even *recognize* the drives to format them.
And this has nothing to do with the drives being too slow, as some here have suggested: in fact it is the newer, faster drives that fail more often.
Also, as I’ve pointed out above, simply finding one drive that works does NOT solve the problem, any more than finding one microphone that works would be considered adequate. A microphone input on a mixer is compatible with essentially every microphone you’ll ever run into (except a very few oddballs, such as low-output ribbon mics, that everyone knows about). Similarly, a USB connector on a digital device should be compatible with essentially every standards-compliant drive. 99%, not 1%! Even my 10 year old computers, if I plug in a USB drive, I can format it and I can write and read files – maybe not fast, but it works. The Qu is simply defective. And, as others here are noting, A&H have taken zero responsibility for fixing the problem, or even publicly acknowledging it.
2019/12/31 at 10:54 pm #88512To question 4, all I can say is that when I worked with the A&H tech support (several hours over several phone calls), they were well aware of the issue, and pointed me to the list of “working drives” (which, as we all know, contains negative examples for every positive; there’s no such thing as a 100% known-good drive), but ultimately they were not able to get it working.
For me, I have one very old drive with not much capacity that I was able to save and restore settings from; but I’ve been unable to find any drives that have enough capacity for recording that the Qu will even recognize in order to format. Tried every suggestion there is, online and from the A&H techs. Ultimately just put some gaff tape over the hole to make it stop taunting me.
I can record to the DAW just fine (over the back panel USB port); but what I can’t do is tell a band that if they want me to record their live event they just need to give me a thumb drive with enough capacity. Instead I have to bring my laptop along and then transfer files to the band’s drive afterwards.
I’d love to hear just a single word from an A&H representative on this thread. It’s hard to believe they wouldn’t know about it.
2019/12/31 at 9:37 pm #88505@volounteer, my best guess is that A&H’s ownership has gotten so messed up because of them being sold and resold to different private equity firms that at this point they have gone a decade or more with management that just wants to suck them dry rather than build brand loyalty. I don’t have any insider info, it’s just a hunch based on their behavior and on the public record of their ownership.
I used to be a factory authorized service center for A&H and I gave up in part because of stuff like this. It’s so discouraging to see a formerly strong company fall into the same vortex of disposable product culture.
2019/12/31 at 6:04 pm #88502Garyh, Jmannn, Xyz – I’m glad you guys are happy. But if you read through this long thread, you’ll see that for everyone reporting success for a given device, there are also people who have that exact same device and it’s not working.
Imagine if this mixer only worked with a few models of microphones. Imagine that I had to have my “blessed” SM57, and I knew that if it ever died I’d be out of luck, because a new SM57 might not work. Imagine if a singer came up to me and said they wanted to use their own mic, and I had to say “sorry, this mixer only works with a couple of microphones, so you’ll have to use mine – even if we get yours working at the top of show, it might crap out half way through.”
That’s *exactly* the situation with the USB port. A few devices work, for a few people, some of the time, and there’s no way to say which ones will or won’t. The majority of devices don’t work, and it’s increasingly difficult to find any that do.
The only reason that 3/4s of us on this thread still own this mixer is because we can get away without needing the USB port. But we bought the mixer in part because of this feature. It would be like buying a mixer that had mic inputs, but most of the time you only need the line inputs, because the mic inputs mostly don’t work.
Allen-Heath have screwed their customers, and they are doing nothing at all to remedy the situation. It’s truly remarkable, and it’s a sad ending to what used to be a reputable company.
2019/12/31 at 1:31 am #88485YodaNoFear, I doubt that plastic vs metal will make much difference – I think the jack would break before the USB drive! Those drives are surprisingly tough.
Now, what has already broken, is my patience with A&H on this issue. I’m about ready to start a class action suit. Everyone who’s bought one of these mixers should be getting some money back – we were all sold a feature set that doesn’t actually exist.
2019/02/28 at 10:48 pm #82295Mike, sounds like you’re experiencing exactly the same thing I did with my Qu16. Airickess’ suggestion did not help me. Neither did hours on the phone with A&H tech support help. Bottom line is, and even A&H support admit this on the phone, there is no *reliable* solution to getting USB devices to work in the Qu16 USB port. Some people get lucky; others don’t. It appears to be pretty random. I’m getting a little bit tired of the lucky ones telling the rest of us that there’s no problem :-/
Anyway, while it won’t help you with audio recording, what I found was that *old, small* USB drives worked okay for firmware. I was able to find an old 512MB thumb drive that the Qu16 would recognize, and I used that drive to upgrade the firmware and then to back up all the mixer settings.
2019/02/13 at 2:15 am #81943My experience is similar to Barry’s. Like him, I’m an old EE with plenty of hardware experience, and I’m pretty good at reading directions. But more to the point: I have tried several of the units that are listed as good – matching down to the detailed part number – and on my board they simply are not recognized. I have spent hours on the phone with A&H tech support so I don’t think I’m missing an obvious step. I’ve tried formatting with every possible file system from both Mac and Windows machines. The bottom line is that, at least on my particular mixer, the vast majority of thumb drives are completely unusable – not only by me, but by A&H’s techs. It has nothing to do with “dumping a bunch of data on a drive quickly”. The drive is NOT RECOGNIZED. Not formattable, not readable. Regardless, as I said, of how and where it is formatted.
I know that everyone is having different symptoms. That is precisely the point. A&H have developed something that is highly unpredictable and highly unreliable, and they are not admitting it and are not supporting their users nor (apparently) doing anything to fix the problem.
2019/02/12 at 2:24 am #81918The points I’d like to make here are:
1. Allen and Heath have been completely silent on this discussion.
2. It’s well documented that drives that work for one person, might not work for another. Whether this is because of variation in mixers or variation in drives is irrelevant: it means that you cannot reliably purchase a drive that works.
3. If I just wanted to record to my own devices, I could record to a laptop. The point of recording to a thumb drive, for me, is that I can tell a band to give me a thumb drive and I can give them a multitrack recording at the end of their set. That only works if the vast majority of drives are supported. Obviously, the set of supported drives is small and unpredictable.
4. This is true not only for recording, but for playback. If acts want to give me a thumb drive of music to play pre-show, I cannot trust that my mixer will read it. In fact for my mixer – and again, I think there may be variation between units – I have only found one drive so far that it *will* read. I have tried dozens. I’m just talking about whether it will recognize the drive, not even whether it will play back or record.I talked to A&H tech support and they were polite but completely useless.
2019/02/05 at 4:40 am #81760Respectfully to the non-Allen&Heath folks who have answered: you’re missing my point.
The bottom line here is that for any single USB device, it might be working for some people and not for others, and it might be working this week and not next.
That is not how USB devices work in a computer. When was the last time you plugged a USB storage device of *any* kind into a computer made in the last three years and had it not be recognized, or fail to format?
A&H are asking us to expect mediocrity. I am really shocked at their unwillingness to respond to this issue.
2018/12/20 at 10:46 pm #80975Have Allen-Heath made any sort of response to this issue? I mean, as many on this thread have noted: the QuDrive port is essentially useless, if you can’t rely on it; and it is obviously not possible to purchase a device that is known to work (because new devices come out and old ones get obsoleted).
Every modern computer, even cheap ones, can read and write to 99% of USB devices flawlessly. Even hobby Arduino devices have no problem. It’s just not that tricky a technology. I could understand if slower devices crapped out with multitrack recording, but the Qu16 can’t even reliably recognize or format a brand new top of the line USB drive unless it is one of the magic blessed few. Imagine if the mixer failed to recognize all but a few power amps, or all but a few microphones? A&H simply don’t seem to be able to engineer it; maybe they don’t have the right engineers on the task.
A&H are really ducking their responsibility here. They need to either get a working USB port, or stop advertising that their devices support USB. I’m seriously considering returning this board, even though I like it in all other regards.
Hello, A&H, are you listening? I’d *like* to like your products…
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