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.

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.

Gear Review: Sennheiser HD 26 Pro Heaphones

     Once again I return to my search for the perfect set of headphones for everything I do. Something that can have me covered for location sound recording, studio recording & mixing, general music listening, gaming and travel headphones. It's a tale fraught with many obstacles, but represents a real challenge for any set of headphones.
     Today I'm taking a look into the Sennheiser HD 26 Pro on ear headphones. It promises to be a different sort of beast to anything I might have used before and has a price tag to suggest I could be on to a winner.

Gear Review: Audio Technica ATH M50x Headphones

   Audio Technica's ATH M50x headphones are the latest revision to their very popular ATH M50 cans. They represent a professional solution for people using the headphones in a wide variety of scenarios. They are the same great headphones, with those great full sounding drivers, but with a very useful collection of detachable cables. You get standard length curly and straight cables, as well as a long straight one, for those occasional long runs you get. So lets take a closer look.

Studio: Now Finished!

I have just completed work on my own studio!!!

Here's a quick video run-down of it:




For a full kit list, hit the Studio tab on my website (http://charliehurst.co.uk)

Twitter: @chazhurst

Gear Review: AKG K271 MKII studio headphones

     The AKG K271 mkII headphones are the, closed-back, bigger brother to AKG's own K240 mkII headphones. They feature very similar design aspects, but have a few little tweaks to make them much more suitable in use as your go-to set of professional cans. Keen readers will know that I reviewed the K240 mkII's last year, and that I liked them quite a lot; but they weren't without their flaws (not least their open backed-ness).

Audio: TouchDAW - Wireless Sequencer Control

     TouchDAW is an affordable midi control app for Android OS devices. It's developer, humatic, charges a mere £3.03 for the app from the Android Market. While the hardware you run it on is obviously more expensive, if you already have an Android OS phone or tablet then the additional outlay for a full hardware control surface is likely to exceed this £3 investment. What you get for the money is a full pre-configured mixer, 9 octave keyboard, transport controls specific to your choice of DAW and a host of other assignable midi controls. Which all in all makes for a bit of a bargain really, as you'd probably end up spending in excess of £200 on a device with as much functionality.

Audio: More Free VST plugins

The Cockos Reaper forum is a very handy place to go when your looking for free stuff. Most of the people who use the software are using because it is free/cheap, so these guys spend a lot of time looking for good free stuff. The people there have recently pointed out this rather nice collection of free VST plugins from Antress Modern Plugins.

It contains a few of their own Modern effects and tools, which cover a great many of the effects you might need for your day to day mixing. But more interestingly they have also produced a series of plug ins that emulate classic studio gear. The clones include Fairchild, SSL and Universal Audio compressors which is nice if you like the colour of those units.

Also, thanks to my freinds at the Monkey Lord forum I was reminded about FerricTDS (Tape Dynamics Simulator), which is a part of another great set of plug-ins from Variety of Sound

Check them out!