Gear Review: Allen & Heath Qu-16 Digital Mixing Console. UPDATED

     Allen & Heath have long been on my radar as a company that builds equipment that has quality far beyond its price placement within the market. In the whole space for analogue and digital mixing consoles in the £1000 to £2000 price bracket not a single one of the desks has all of the features that I've wanted to see. There's always one or two trade-offs to allow for some other forward thinking feature. The Yamaha 01V96i has card expandability, but only 12 mic pres. The Focusrite Control 2802 has 32 inputs of analogue summing and a glorious bus compressor but no EQ on the channel strip. The Allen & Heath Zed R16 has 16 solid pres, EQ's on everyone and flexible digital routing, but is cramped to operate with only 70mm faders and very narrow channel spacing.
     The Qu-16 from Allen & Heath has it's own special feature. 18 channels of direct to USB hard drive recording. It also has 16 high quality mic preamps, a selection of stereo inputs and FX returns. Two built in digital FX sends and twelve mix outputs. This is a desk designed for live use but with plenty of recording grunt and comes in at a very affordable price for the features.

     UPDATE: The Qu-16 has now been updated a few times and as such I've added a bit of extra insight to some of those new features. Most valuable to me is it's ability to now control DAW systems under Windows operating systems natively, making it a great hub around which to base a studio.

Initial Impression
     The first thing you notice when looking at the board is that it's a very clean front facing surface. No cables cluttering things up on top and lots of space for buttons and big fingers. Having not used a digital desk for a while (my last experience was a rather more
 complex Yamaha DM2000) I was intrigued to see how easy it was to st up and start navigating around the menus. I was wrong to feel any sort of trepidation as Allen & Heath have designed the touch screen menus with the engineer in mind. No hidden deep lying functions hidden under piles of tabs and menus. Everything is cleanly labelled and straight out of the box is ready to use with all of the basic routing set up.




What's it got?
     Firstly this is an all digital desk with everything on board controlled digitally. All 16 preamp levels are set using the knob in the top left corner of the board and so are the stereo inputs. Just select your channel and turn the knob. The there's a digital channel strip on every input channel whcih consists of a gate, parametric EQ, and compressor. They even extend down to EQ's on FX returns and graphic EQ's and compression on every output. All of these are controlled using the  controls at the top left of the board with dedicated rotary controls for each effect. The graphic EQ's are controlled by a fader flip on the main fader bank. this gives you a 100mm fader with which to control every frequency on the stereo EQ module, which is perfect for taming feedback or tweaking the PA.
      Beyond the inputs and outputs are the digital features. On the back panel we have a USB-B port for streaming 24 channels of audio in both directions between a PC (Mac or Windows). This works down to very low latencies, which is perfect for recording guitars and vocals while streaming audio from the DAW rather than direct monitoring, which is also possible. Additionally the USB port can also be used as a MIDI control interface for DAW's, giving options for both HUI for ProTools and Mackie Control for other DAW's. The versatility of which will be hugely useful to anyone looking to use this desk in their studio.
      Then there is the Networking port which can be used to connect the Qu series mixers to a local area network, which allows you to control the mixer using an iPad from anywhere in the room, which is going to be great for venues where the mix position is less than ideally placed.
      Also present on the back panel is A&H's proprietary dSnake connection for connecting their own digital snakes to the desk. This unfortunately doesn't open up further channels to the Qu-16 but allows remote control of up to 16 preamps that are on stage.
      The final unusual port on the back is a four pin XLR plug for the LED bendy lamp, which is incredibly handy for those dark corners that are usually inhabited by us soundies.
     Then we move to the front panel where there is a further USB port, which is designed to have a portable hard drive plugged directly into it. This "Qu-Drive" port allows you to record 18 tracks of audio directly to the hard drive, which works out very nicely for the Qu-16 with its 16 pre's and various stereo inputs.


That's a lot of stuff in one rack mountable frame...
     The combination of features really does make this a pretty astounding all in one toolbox for any combined FoH/Monitor position and you could create incredibly complex mixes with just this board at your fingertips. Just last week I saw a one man FoH engineer have to carry, up a narrow staircase to the first floor, a double rack width case with a big heavy middle of the road 16 channel analogue desk sitting on top, with 4U of parametric EQ for the PA and an old Mac Pro tower and screen (as well as a full stereo PA and foldback monitors). The combination of features he had in that rig, which probably weighed about as much as a car, can be done with exactly the same quality in a box that requires one mains socket and you can carry in under one arm.
     I have already put it to task in recording a rock band at their rehearsal space. A small footprint device like this with so much going on made life vastly easier than essentially migrating my studio to another town and setting up before I even get started on cabling mics and all of the complexity that can entail. We tracked the drums using the desk and created a foldback mix of DI'd guitars for each player. The routing options available for doing so were just so simple I reckon my mum could probably operate it with a couple hours of orientation.


What's missing?
     Well from my perspective I would have loved to be able to use it as a centrepiece to my current studio set up. In there I have a workstation based around an RME Fireface UFX, which has 16 ADAT inputs as well as 12 analogue inputs. The Qu-16 has two sets of USB i/o, dSnake and a stereo AES output at its disposal, but sadly no other digital connections.
     With 16 ADAT outputs running 48kHz and the analogue connections this desk would actually be the perfect companion and centre piece to my studio.
     This would be the best compact mixer on the market if only it didn't fall just shy of my requirements. No direct outputs on the mic preamps. The directs can only be sent over USB or to one of the mixer output buses. Sadly the Allen & Heath driver suite is nothing exciting (even more stripped back to just audio interfacing on PC) offering barely any of the incredible features that are in RME's TotalMixFX package, by which I have been spoiled for too long!
     The final drawback on this board is that it is locked permanently to 48kHz. No double rates, not quad rates, not even 44.1kHz. Now for a live mixer this doesn't represent a problem at all. It's more than adequate for most recording jobs, but when it comes to music in the studio, some people will demand that their drums be recorded at 44.1 or 88.2 and so if I was sent a project that was outside of 48kHz I'd be forced to convert every file and the project to 48kHz to make sure I was getting the best audio workflow before working on it.

How does it sound?
     It sounds great.
     In all seriousness it sounds as good as, if not better than, that old Yamaha DM2000 and is easier to configure and has seemingly more DSP power under the hood. The effects all sound great. The compressors on the outputs are effective and easy to set up with a variety of different models to choose from. The visualisation of the EQ's also makes it very easy to dial in what you want quickly listen and then happily leave it alone for the rest of the show.
     The mic pre's are very good. They are apparently based on the more expensive GLD and iLive consoles so should be more than capable of dealing with anything that can be thrown at them.
     I've thrown my full range of mics at these pre's and nothing seems to push them into unusable noise. The only thing I haven't tested them with is a ribbon mic, which could test them the most.
     My main point of comparison is my RME Fireface UFX mic pre's which I also think sound great. Crystal clear and safe to use on practically any material so you can add some dirt later. The preamps on the Qu-16 sound just as good, but with a bit more character than the UFX.


In Use
     The most incredible thing about this board is actually how ergonomic and simple it is to use. Having wandered it into a bands rehearsal space to get some recordings done I quickly set up all the channels I needed from mics and DI's using the impressive mic pres. Once set I worked on developing two fold back headphone mixes. One for the drummer and another for the rest of the band. Simple. I was recording to both my DAW on my PC over USB, and recording 18 tracks to the USB QuDrive, monitoring my mix and audio on the main mix layer, mixing and monitoring two foldback mixes. From turning up to the studio, on my own, with a car full of kit to being completely set up took probably less than an hour.
     The only thing it lacks in the sense of ergonomics is the lack of information about which mix you are currently in, every now and again I did grab a fader only to find I was wrecking a monitor mix rather than playing with my own mix. The only thing indicating which mix you are in is a very small green light over the button that selects the mix. It's easy to miss, but equally if you know the board well you'll get to know it's signals better and stop making that mistake.
   

TL:DR
     With the the continuing evolution of the digital desk that defines it as a product that can do everything in one box, a lot of companies have come out with excellent solutions to the old way of having 20u racks all around you full of effects and gear. The Qu-16 is another success story for Allen & Heath, with a well featured and well built desk that fits to a price point. That said it's not without its caveats, but they all lack something at this price point. If they didn't, we'd be paying a lot more for something which actually is the perfect product.

     If you want to check out more mixers in this price bracket it'll be worth having a look into the PreSonus StudioLive series, Yamaha 01V96i, Allen & Heath ZED-R16, Behringer X32 and Focusrite Control 2802. All great desks in their own right, but each with their own strengths and weaknesses.