[DilettantParticipant]

Now i can choose the di for the pupose. With build in i can’t.

Thats simply not true.

You could use your external DI and plug it into the Mic In of the Stagebox as you do now. You just had the option to plug your Instruments into the Line Jack without one and then had a ground lift.

To save space, TF/XLR Combo Jacks could be used for this. XLR as Mic In, TF as Line In with integrated DI and Ground Lift.

[DilettantParticipant]

You could always use a post fader aux mix that you send your channels and group outputs panned specifically for the delay speakers

Sure, but then you have to do the Panning of up to 48 Input Channels and of course all your groups twice with a little Difference. That is not really practicable to handle, especially when you decide to set up a quick delay line after the first 10 Minutes of the gig because it is more windy than you thought.

An optimal Solution even for studio use would be an optional Haas Stereo Processor as DEEP Plugin in the Matrix that allows to convert the Signal to MS, then readjust M and S Levels (and maybe phases) for the delay line and then recombine to LR with adjusted width. But i think to have simply Balance and Width would be enough for most live use cases.

A “deLuxe” Version would also allow to switch between level and phase panning for mono Signals. Not to forget a “Slave” Function for Aux Sends so Balance/Panning and Width for Aux Mixes can follow the Master Mix automatically. But that was suggested in another Thread of the Forum already.

[DilettantParticipant]

or you could add it now yourself. it is called a smart phone or ipad.

Well, most USB Sticks have a Type A Connector. Which Beast of a Smartphone model has that socket?

Ok, the Microsoft Surface 100″ Tablet in our conference Room has. But maybe that is just a little
unhandy since it weights about 200kg…

SCNR

[DilettantParticipant]

I was successful running SQ Mixpad in a Windows 10 VM with VirtualBox. A little slow but usable to make some basic show setup.

[DilettantParticipant]

At least that’s a feature that should considered for future Hardware Versions.

Maybe it would be a consideration then to integrate a smoll SOC maybe with an Android in it for such Jobs so the expensive and more proprietary FPGA Hardware can concentrate on the audio centric work and the SOC can act as a Media Player, DLNA or Streaming Server, WLAN Access Point (so the desk could feed Tablets without need of a separate AP / DHCP Server) and such things. It could even be possible to stream directly from/to youtube or digital radio. And as a side benefit it could ease the management of scene data and such things.

The St3 is a fine Idea, already recognized it. In my own Mixer Case, there is also a cheap Bluetooth receiver on ST1 so I can at least stream some audio from Smartphones or Tablets now. However, would be nice not to need additional Boxes for such things.

BTW in my special Case I could also easily live with much less Inputs on the SQ6 itself since most of the Signal sources are connected over the stageboxes.
If there had been a little cheaper SQ6 with 8-12 preamps and maybe 2 or 3 I/O Module Slots instead, that definitely would have been my choice.

[DilettantParticipant]

I had many crappy USB sticks in use for Photography things in last years, but even the crappiest USB2 one i ever saw could write at least 8 MB/s on the long run which is much more than 32 Track 48/24 Recording should need – a 48/24 Track is a raw Data stream of roughly 150 kBytes per Second. There were some USB 1.0 Sticks with 1,5 MB/s Limit years ago, but with USB3 and later i’ve seen at least 10 MBit/s.

What I see on some Linux Systems is that some modern big Sticks make long Lags (up to 30 seconds) after Blocks of several Gigabytes of Data. Even those beasts were able to write at least 16 GBytes of Data in 10 Minutes which is an average around 25 MBytes per second. They make 2 or 3 long lags while that but they do it. Including final “sync”, of course.

So if the SQ had a 1 or 2 GB Write Buffer which is enough for several Minutes of 32 Track Recording at least that Problem would exist no more for most users. Maybe there are other Problems as well, but the symptoms seem to indicate this one for me.

Removing the Stick too early can anyway only happen with such crappy sticks which at the moment do not work at all. In other cases, the buffer won’t fill, so the result is same than now.

So what is better from a User point of view? “Recording breaks” or “have to wait to avoid breaking of Recording”?

Since it is practically impossible to know if a stick is good or bad without testing it (even same models of same brands vary with production charges)
it sure is a Problem – just look at the corresponding Thread in the Forum.

An Alternative would be to switch to SDXC for Multitracking – with such recorders there are reported far less problemms of that kind. OTOH SDXC cannot be used to attach a Hard disk or bigger SSD Drive.

[DilettantParticipant]

Seems like most Thumb Drives won’t work reliable for multitracking.

But what is the general Problem here?

48/24 makes a raw data Rate per Channel of somewhat around 150 kBytes/sec. so 32 Tracks should need a raw Bandwidth of roughly 5 Megabytes per Second.

Even if the Overhead for Filesystem, Metadata, Organization and so on doubles that (which would be a terribly inefficient implementation), that can not be a Problem. Even the crappiest USB Sticks i ever found were able to write 10 MBytes per Second or more on large files.

What comes up on some linux systems is that many thumb drives take very long lags (up to 30 Seconds) between big Blocks of Data.
Don’t know what they are doing there but that can generate filesystem timeouts sometimes. Even with that the overall writing
Speed extends an long-run average of 10 MBytes/sec in nearly all cases though.

So what goes wrong here? Incompatibilities with specs? A bigger write Buffer that could take 1 or 2 minutes of recording data
to bridge over that lags? Is the USB Port Hardware of the SQ flawed somehow?

If we could know that we could look out for thumb drive specs not triggering that Problem (and A&H could improve SQ Drive with next hardware generation).

[DilettantParticipant]

The Argument of library storage is valid, no question. Future Models of the Mixer can solve that, the current one may have limits there.

For next hardware generation i would also suggest to integrate a much bigger Buffer for SQ Drive Recording. It seems to me that this is a main source of reported problems with several cheap USB Sticks?

Maybe, an additional M2 Slot to optionally install a SSD for such things would be great. Could be used for internal Multitrack Recording, Playback libraries (think of Jingles) and even for additional Software. Should be accessible as Mass Storage via USB. Further on would give an Option to integrate DLNA Server and Streaming functions via Ethernet, WLAN or Bluetooth. Think of youtube live streams and such applications. Or of customers that can download recordings via WLAN/DLNA at the end of the session even after live gigs.

When it comes to MP3, that is simply the widespread defacto Standard on audio files these days. You do not have to like it (i personally prefer Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus and FLAC by far) but there is no way around it. Basically a must-have. Even Car radios, Camping Freezeboxes and kitchen clocks can play MP3 from USB or SD Cards (newer Cars from VW playback FLAC and Ogg, too, for example).

For a way to playback spontanously brought-in consumer audio “we don’t linke the format” is a bad argument. Support for as many widespread formats as possible is the way to go. OGG and Opus are heavily used for Audio in the net, FLAC is the fastest and most widely supported losless audio codec and suitable for long-term archiving. AIFF is apple-centric and a bit more historic but widely used by creative people.

Somehow, those codecs are the Pendants to JPG, PNG, GIF and TIFF in Photography. None of them has a known patent or license problem.

I don’t think a future SQ Generation needs to be able to write them all, but playback would be useful without doubt. Having to send people away because of technical limitations is always a bad thing at the end of the day.

[DilettantParticipant]

The WAV player is a good start. But when it comes to “normal” Folks, a “Music File” is a synonym for a MP3 for many people. You can like that or not, you can not change it :-|.

Some anecdotic experience: A small opening party for some village Place – i was there to do Speaker amplification for the local “most important Politician”, so i had a small Mixer, two active Speakers, two Microphones and some cable drums with me. No demand to bring in more gear for that.

Of course, the SQ would be essentially too big for that job but today i might take it with me anyway because it is there anyway and it has some useful Features for speaker amplification smaller Mixers might not have.

However, after the first Talk i was informed that the local Rescue Dog group wanted to do a presentation and so they would need to playback the Music “from this USB Stick”. Luckily i hat a solution with me, but that was more luck than plan.

Well, you can say “sorry folks, I cannot play that because i have no mp3 Player here” – the “Reaction” of normal Folk might be something like “Kidding, yea? You say you have highly professional Audio Gear here that cannot playback a simple MP3 File? In 2021? Even my Handy can do that. Did you steal your gear from the Egypt Museum or what?”.

[DilettantParticipant]

Just an additional Idea: Option “Mix Buttons behave a little more like talkback”

Short tip on Mix/FX Button -> switch to that mix (and signal that) until another one is tipped or after a configurable time of user inactivity.

Holding of Mix Button -> switch to that Mix but jump Back to main Mix immediately when the Mix/FX Button is released.

Could reduce “Accidents” if the User gets into the habit of just holding the Mix Button for short adjustments.

Combined with optical Signalling that could be a real innovative Concept.

[DilettantParticipant]

Additon: it would also be nice if playback even worked with standard formatted USB sticks (the FAT Patents are BTW also history) and a simple subdir selection so we don’t have to fiddle around when someone asks “can you play the music on my USB Stick?”.

[DilettantParticipant]

MP3 Patents have run out long ago, according to wikipedia.de the last one in 2017. And IIRC the licensing was always free for playback, just not for encoding.

[DilettantParticipant]

There is “Scene store current” IIRC?

[DilettantParticipant]

For mag labels you can just use Magnetic Inkjet Photo foils available from several Stores or Amazon:

See offer on Amazon

I Just did print and cut complete stripe sets on my A3 Printer, working fine on SQ6 surface, SQ6 backside,
AR2412 and AB1608 and can easily be exchanged or removed when needed even at work. Unneeded stripes can be
stacked in an unused edge of the mixer surface.

Found that longer stripes labelling complete rows of buttons or connectors are more reliable than single
“Labels” which may tend to move around a little bit while transportation. So i have one for FX and Aux busses,
one for soft keys 1-4, one for soft keys 9-16, and two smaller ones for soft keys 5-6 and one for soft keys 7-8.

On Back side I have only Labels for Input 1 and 2 and the XLR outputs – other signals are on stageboxes with that setup.

All you need is a Inkjet printer, the Mag Photo Paper, some metal ruler and some cutting tool
(scissors, cutting knife and steel ruler or even an Ideal 1038 Paper cutting machine work well).
No need for adhesives on either side.

See attachment for example, feel free to adapt it to your needs.

Don’t wory about the chosen texts and colors, they are very specific for my task – you definitely will want to change 🙂

PS: something is badly broken with the edit feature of the forum, it removes my posting instead of changing it.

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[DilettantParticipant]

Just because some people or their use case does not need 96 does not mean we should all be stuck with 48.

And where did i write to do so? Right: nohwere.

I just wrote there is no reason to stop comparing 96 and 48 kHz consoles. There are many reasons to do so. Not for everyone may be, but for many users. And so we won’t stop that.

[Author]

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