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: 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.

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!).

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: Sound Devices 744T location sound recorder

     I'm a little late to the party here as, now, the 744T has been around for quite a number of years now and has effectively been superseded by newer and more feature rich recorder/mixers like Sound Devices own 664 and 633 and Zaxcom's Nomad. However, as I was in the market for an improved recording experience over my Roland R26, the 744T presented itself, through the 2nd hand market, as a very affordable upgrade path to reaching a professional grade recorder with Timecode syncing capabilities. That combined with my collection of Sennheiser MKH mics, fulfills my goal of attaining the most transparent audio recordings I've yet been able to make.

Review: SSL Duende Native Essentials

     Solid State Logic (SSL) have been at the top of the studio audio market for what seems like forever. Their success has been built on products that are both consistently incredible sounding and reliable. Studio tools that never fail and hardware that stands the test of time.

     Their Duende plugins are no exception. When these plugins were first realised it was required that any users also had a powerful DSP card to go with them; such were the processing requirements that would have strained computers of that time to breaking point without ever hitting useful numbers of instances of the plugins. With the power of modern computers SSL have completely revamped their plugin offering over the last few years so that they can all be run "Native", which means without additional DSP cards or boxes.

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: Bose QC15 Noise Cancelling Headphones

    As the long standing flagship model in the Bose headphone range, the QC15's are highly regarded as a benchmark in not only noise cancelling technology, but also in sheer audio fidelity. They are an icon of both style and quality. With that in mind, how does this pair of £250 cans live up to those lofty expectations?

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.

Guitar Review: Ibanez SV5470F NBL

When I saw this instrument on the rack at Andertons Music, in Guildford, I decided to give it a go, because I'd never played an instrument worth more than about £600. This guitar had a sticker on it that said "Reduced: £1400 - £1099"... At first I was sceptical, but I was assured by staff that the only problems were cosmetic. There were one or two very minor scratches that you can only see from very close up. It was also the demo model that was out on the shop floor... All in all though, practically zero fret wear and minimal signs of use. I plugged in, and had nothing but fun for about 20 minutes.

For me, it has the perfect feature list. Skinny neck, massive frets, carbon nut, locking tuners, no pointy bits to bang on things, pickup versatility and a non-locking fully floating trem (which you can lock to the body if you want to). Read on for more...

Taking on Windows 8

You might be asking yourself if Windows 8 is going to be the OS that you've been waiting for; with all of it's new productivity and efficiency upgrades, or, is it, with it's "Metro" UI, an incomplete transition into touch based desktop and laptop computing, which represents little of what Windows users liked about the previous OS and then also not that much of what the future may hold for Microsoft's next generation of OS?

Gear Review: Roland R-26 Portable Recorder

Just arrived this week, a shiny new Roland R-26 portable recorder. This little device has the best and most complete feature list of anything on the market in this form factor. Compared with the ubiquitous Zoom H4n, the Roland R-26 is quite simply another level above, putting it close to devices in the 4+ channel recorder segment. In my five hours with the device since I got home from work, and then charged some AA batteries, I've only been impressed with how it performs. The depth and quality of features on show is quite astounding. I would put it right at the top of the pecking order of portable recorders available right now.

Gear Review: Blackstar HT Dual "Pure Valve Distortion" pedal

    This pedal is part of Blackstars HT range of tube driven effects pedals. The HT-Dual is one of seven distinct drive pedals in the range and sits in a position that makes it probably the most versatile of the bunch. Similar to the HT-Metal, it is a two channel, foot-switchable, distortion pedal; with a drive circuit that is powered/flavoured by a standard 12AX7/ECC83 pre-amp valve.
   I've been using for about a year now in a whole host of environments and usage scenarios so I thought I'd share my experiences.

Gear Review: Lovepedal Redhead

    The Redhead is a limited run pedal which re-releases an older Lovepedal design, the Superlead, in a new shell and with a tweaked EQ/Tone control circuit. The circuit isn't completely original, it is said to be derived from something like an old Marshall Guv'nor circuit, but with simplified tone shaping controls. Some would question why you would pay the kind of money you do for boutique effects, when you could effectively build them yourself for a fraction of the cost; I say who cares. This thing looks good and sounds great, and it wasn't built by me, a second rate solderer at best.

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).

Gear Review: Chapman Guitars ML-2

This is a review of the original Chapman Guitars ML-2, which was released as a limited run of 250 units worldwide. This is not a review of the since re-released model now available from Andertons Music. If you want to know more about that then I recommend watching this video on Rob's Youtube channel.

     Chapman Guitars is a guitar company based in the UK, run by Rob Chapman (of YouTube fame), who makes limited run guitars based around the principle of collaborative design. They also offer a custom shop design fulfilled by Jaden Rose, in the form of their Explorer shaped Ghost Fret.
     The ML-2 is the most recent guitar to come out of Rob Chapman's company. The guitar was  collaboratively designed by votes cast by his YouTube followers and members of his forum. The design of the guitar was prototyped by Jaden Rose, but copied and built en masse in a factory in China.

Gear Review: AKG K240 MKII studio headphones

     AKG's open-backed studio-grade monitoring headphones, equivalent to their own closed backed 271 mkII, are a lightweight and well priced option for the hobbyist or professional musician and audio engineer.
     These headphones have been out for a little while now, but I've been using them fairly extensively since I bought them around Christmas time. I thought it was about time I did a review in case anyone was thinking of buying a new set of cans...