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.

No more wires? Apple removes the audio jack

Apple has announced the new iPhone, and with it a complete lack of revolutionary improvements, except for one thing: They've taken out the headphone jack socket in favour of using just a single solitary multipurpose lightning connector. But is it revolutionary or just controversial clickbait to send traffic to their site to buy more products?

Gear Review: Zoom F8 Multi Track Field Recorder

Recently I've been getting a few jobs that require both portability and track counts greater than the four I usually deal with using my Sound Devices 744T. In terms of building a kit that can offer both of those factors, along with a wide number of options and similar performance level to the Sound Devices kit then there isn't much out there that doesn't cost somewhere near the thick end of £5000; and that would be before you add on all of the extra accessories that go with it. This is where the Zoom F8 comes in. It costs less that £1000 and appears, at first glance, to have a lot of the functionality of something vastly more expensive like the SD 788T or Sonosax SXR4+. So lets explore that and see just how well something this low cost can perform the tasks demanded of much more expensive kit.

Using an Allen & Heath Qu-16 with timecode sync

It's a regular thing in this industry: A last minute call for a production that is happening in 2 days time or the other side of a weekend with requirements a little bit outside of what you can provide out of your own standard kit store.

I was asked recently to provide a mix and multitrack of eight inputs for a quiz panel show in just such circumstances. Thankfully I'd already made a vague plan about how to go about this ever since I'd picked up my Allen & Heath Qu-16 digital desk and had even thought of a few things that add functions which, on the face of things, aren't really part of its design remit.

Electronics & Antennae: Sennheiser G2 Radio SMA aerial mod

Welcome to another episode of "What to do when you have no work on..."

This week I've been tinkering with my soldering iron and doing a bit of basic electronics; while also gently dipping my toes into the black art of antenna repair/design. Neither of these things are completely alien to me. My degree in Broadcasting Technology got me problem solving electronics and I've been soldering for half of my life, and basic antenna design was a semester length module as part of my University time so after about a half hours reading I'm getting the gist of things again.

Gear Review: LOM Uši electret condenser microphones

"Uši /uʃɪ:/ is a pair of stereo-matched, high quality omni-directional electret microphones. Compared with regular built-in microphones supplied with many recorders, Uši have exceptionally low noise and high sensitivity. They are especially useful for recording delicate sounds and environments."

Gear Review: Telefunken M82 Dynamic microphone

The Telefunken M82 is a microphone aimed most directly at people looking to get an "all-in-one" mic for tackling one of the most challenging sources in music recording.; the kick drum.

Gear Review: Fostex AR501 Mic Preamplifier

    Fostex are a company that have always been in and around the field audio recording market. With their industry leading portable DAT recording machines and excellent preamps they have always historically brought good products to market.
    The Fostex AR501 is a single channel (although capable of being ganged into a stereo configuration) microphone preamp which can provide +48V Phantom power which can run off a single AA battery. The concept behind the product is a high quality preamp that can be used quickly and easily with small camera setups on cameras that lack proper XLR inputs. However Fostex have had the forethought to include an XLR direct output should you require it (I do!).