[DickonParticipant]

I mixed for ~7 years on an LS9, then moved to a church with a GLD80 for 3 years. I’m now starting to mix on an SQ-7, and we do a broadcast stream.

The biggest difference that hasn’t been mentioned much on this thread is the colour channel label strips. It makes a huge usability difference, especially for volunteers who may not be that familiar with the profile.

Concerning the original poster’s requirements for different mixes for overflow rooms and for braodcast: you have the option with the SQ of taking unprocessed preamp output into a DAW, via USB or Dante or whatever. A PC/Mac with a DAW might be relatively cheap to get hold of, compared to going up to an Aventis. We do that for our broadcast stream, using ProTools fed from Dante stageboxes, and we put quite a bit of work on getting the DAW processing nice. A good worship mix for live sound in the main auditorium is not going to be great for broadcast. We appreciate a lot more dynamic range live than people listening at low level at home on small speakers are well served by. We know what the bass frequency response of our PA system is, but for all we know someone is listening on a iphone and will miss a pure bass line so I want more harmonics for the live broadcast stream. With the approach you take on the LS9, you can address that to a point with matrix mixes and a bit of extra processing, but there are other ways.

Or, to put it another, what you are paying for the SQ price point upwards is a lot of expensive dedicated electronics (the FPGA in the case of SQ) for the sake of getting close to zero latency. Doing that in software on a general purpose computer is cheaper, and possibly more flexible, but cannot reliably achieve low enough latency for people in the same room who get the direct sound from the musicians, and from the congregation singing, and the room sound. So, by all means use an SQ for the live worship mix, but think about other approaches for feeds to broadcast and others rooms. Without knowing your situation, it could well be that a mix largely driven by compressors on the DAW may be a much better experience than a matrix mix from the front of house desk.

I’m happy to go into details here or via private message.

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