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.

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: 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: TC Electronic BMC-2 Monitor Controller and DAC

    When my old TC Level Pilot died on me I needed a new master monitor controller. The TC Level Pilot is essentially a stacked matched pair of variable resistors in one pot. The build quality seems high, until general wear and tear takes it's toll and it starts crackling and cutting out. Not great for a pro audio device. I needed something more feature packed and with more advanced features and greater overall value.

    My final choice as the replacement for that mini monitor controller was the BMC-2 also by TC Electronic. This unit is really a very different beast. What we have here is a multi-input DAC with the ability to take AES, SPDIF, ADAT and TOS and convert any one of those to a couple of balanced XLR outputs, a headphone output, and to a digital output of your choice. All the while the BMC-2 provides a variety of monitoring functions for the mix and mastering engineer.

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

Sound: Now Accepting Pro Tools 11

Just about 10 minutes ago I ordered my first ever copy of Pro Tools (which I keep typing "Pro TOols"). That isn't to say that I have no experience with manipulating audio on computers. I do, and lots of it, making music and mixing multi-track recordings over the years in Cubase, Live, Reason, Reaper, Sound Forge and Audacity.

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).