[EmanKantParticipant]

Hi Gsus,

looks like we agree on most of the items. I suggest to skip the Behringer discussion, because it would be mainly on marketing strategy.

Interesting is, that Keith capsuled the whole issue as a “formfactor”-question. I watched him on the tutorial video (Keith sorry, I am talking in 3rd person, I am
not at all sure wether you will read this. In case please transform 3rd into 1st person by cognitive switching). And he claims segments totally different from the musical performance market.
He mentioned the conference-room-, church- and broadcast installations. And in these segments the rack will play a small role only, maybe none. These installs are permenantly wired, so what should a remotecontrolled rack be good for here?

When it comes to live performance in whatever locations the situation is totally different. The recent success of the racks in this application shows imho the way where it will run to. Starting in the late 1980s the areas of industrial producion automation and telecommunications have switched to manager-agent configurations, wehre the agent units are integrated locally into the production lines and are managed remotecontrolled. So in our case this means, transporting signals from stage to FOH, manipulating it there and sending it back will be an outdated approach within an minor couple of years. This will make all the big and costly consoles become obsolete.

Do not take me wrong. I do not believe, that the existing “rack-formfactor”-units will be the ones do perform this change. These all are toys compared to what will be necessary. But they will at least
serve as proof of concept.

Now, as for your question on what do do and what to buy. The UI24R is the best selling unit these days, and they look nice at first view. But imho they lack a couple of features
essential for satisfying the contemporary sound requirements. Neither FXes nor dynamics are really controllable. Just two buzzwords taken for examples: powerbox reverb and New York compression (parrallel comp.). But you can find a lot more of these missing items.

One more thing is the number of Auxes, that is more and more requested for InEars. The UI24R has got 8 Auxes, that would be 4 in stereo mode. Now, you have 24 mic preamps, but can only serve 4 people with stereo phones. Does that make sense? OK, they argue, that mono InEars is good enough and you can control your personal mix via MoreMe function on your smartphone. Imagine a performing musician messing around with his telephones on stage. That´ll be the comedy part of the show.

So I hope that maybe Keith will step into the discussion and even more maybe think the subject over.

[EmanKantParticipant]

sorry, should be of course

– a broad range of features, without going deep on anything

[EmanKantParticipant]

Hi Keith,

before I will try to answer your question concerning the “I’d be (genuinely!) interested to know which features of the SQ you’d need in this form-factor that they don’t provide”-quwestion, I want to state, that I understand your aim to to go for a long product-lifecycle with the QU-racks, at least until return on the R&D-invest is secured.

On the other hand I do not have to tell you, that the immature segment of consumer-digital-mixers still follows the innovate-or-die-rule. Your competitors Presonus and Soundcraft have released the 3rd version resp. 2nd version of their rack-line recently. For the discussion let us leave aside Behringer, who is based in a different market segment, targetting on customers looking for seems-similar-to-gear for performing sounds-similar-to-music.

As for the SC UI24R, the 1st 10,000 units have been sold easily within not even six month after roll-out. Adressing the 1000-$/€ segment this must have gathered enough on revenue to pass the break-even.

The UI24R, though selling pretty well, is incorporating, compared to the QU-racks, a couple of flaws. The WLAN-support is messy, the unit is still noisy, despite of better preamps than its predecessors, and the processing features are implemented rudimentary only. No sidechaining on gate and comp, no reverb-parameters or reverb-types. But the buyers seem not to care, some are waiting for firmware updates, that probably will never show up.

The main selling points seem to be
– the browser-based GUI, running on everything that can carry a browser.
– a broad range of features, within going deep on anything
– 24 channels
– usability as an audio interface, with a latendy of only 0,58ms unprocessed and 3.19 ms processed.

The QU-racks do offer all these dynamics- and FX-features , but they come with double the latency and an IPad control app only. The pro community, at least in Europe, seems to be not so Apple-minded. That is imho one of the reasons why the QU-racks are often sorted out as candidates. Though they are known to be good-sounders.

Now

– the 96kHz and the 0.7ms latency of the SQ (for DAW-use)
– combined with an universalized GUI (for everyone)
– the 8 FX-engines of the SQ
– the plugin-options of the SQ
– the connectivity-options of the SQ

could be arguments that can not be overheard. Even if the unit does not fit under the 1000€-barriere.

Kind regards
E.K.

[Author]

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