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.
