Behringer WING vs. Allen & Heath SQ5 for Worship Ministry

in this video i'm going to be comparing the behringer wing with the allen and heath sq5 digital mixing console if you're a worship leader or a tech team leader looking to upgrade the digital mixer at your church then you're in the right place because these two mixing consoles are really amazing options and i'm just going to say up front you can't go wrong with either one but in this video i want to walk you through some of the things such as how you route audio with these mixing consoles and what the user interface feels like and what the experience is like so that you can just be better informed as you select the mixing console for your church and you'll be able to decide which one best suits your specific needs and preferences all of that coming up [Music] my name is jake gosling with churchfront.com helping you lead gospel centered in tech savvy worship if you haven't already make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you don't miss out on any of our latest videos to help you grow yourself and grow your church today i'm at sweetwater headquarters and they have graciously allowed us to come into their studio to film a few hands-on reviews for you guys so be sure to check out the links below this video if you are interested in picking up any of this gear you can check it all out on their website to learn more about these products and be sure to contact your sweetwater sales representative if you have additional questions why did i choose the behringer wing and the sq5 for the side by side comparison well if you're a worship leader like me and you're considering a mixing console upgrade like me in the year is 2020 like it is then i would consider these two mixing consoles as some of the best options available there are other amazing makes and models out there but for the three to four thousand dollar price point in really having all of the necessary features one would look for in a mixing console for modern worship these mixers both nail it to provide a little bit more context in what someone like myself is looking for in a mixing console i want to mention a few of those key things and these are the things i often bring up when i'm chatting with worship leaders or tech leaders within worship ministry school when we're consulting them on what upgrades they should be considering so the first thing with digital mixing console make sure you have a sufficient channel count so usually anything above 32 channels will suffice for most small to mid-size church worship ministries the other thing you want to have is really flexible audio routing with these mixing consoles alongside of the compatible stage boxes audio routing is something most folks just don't really consider when they're diving into the world of mixing consoles but it's so so important to be able to conveniently route audio to and from the stage in mixing console within seconds and in both of these mixing consoles can do that another thing to consider about your digital mixing console in 2020 is to have the flexibility to route audio from the mixing console to a computer that could be running a daw to capture a multi-track recording or if you're going to start mixing in a box for your live stream using ableton live or pro tools you want to have that flexibility and ease of use to get your multi-track audio from your digital mixing console to your computer running ableton live mixing for your broadcast and then send that mixed audio to your live stream you could route it back through the mixing console you could go straight to your video switcher there's lots of ways to do that but these are just some of the big factors i'm thinking about when i'm approaching the topic of purchasing a digital mixer for worship and closely related to audio routing is the ability to add a dante expansion card to your mixing console it allows you to send multiple channels of audio over ethernet networking cable so then you can easily send your multi-track audio to and from your computers or other devices anywhere in your church and it all happens over a local area network and one of the awesome things about the dante networking protocol is its brand agnostic meaning that it's really compatible with all these different makes in models of mixing consoles you can also load it into any mac or pc the dante virtual sound card so it just really makes getting audio from one device to another very very easy it's also important to note that not all mixing consoles or devices out there have dante compatibility and we'll talk a little bit more about that in comparing these mixing consoles here in a few minutes so those are the major things i'm looking for as a worship leader who leans on the more tech savvy side of the spectrum those are the features i'm looking for when i am purchasing a new mixing console now i want to briefly share my thoughts and impressions on each of these consoles here let's start with the behringer wing when i look at the behringer wing the word that comes to mind for me is innovation i think behringer is doing some amazing things to sort of lead the industry specifically in this price point the thing that stands out the most of course is this large touch screen interface and we are in the age of touch screens and for the longest time it just seems like a lot of these digital mixing consoles out there have these very mediocre touch screens or or no touch screen capability whatsoever if you think about the the x32 um and when we're so used to our smartphones and tablets it's just really nice to have that type of ui on a large touchscreen that's super fast super responsive so this touchscreen on the wing is an amazing feature that stands out to me the other amazing thing they've done with this console is just the the innovation around audio routing and i'll show you that in a minute if your church already has been using an x32 or even an m32 for many years now since those consoles have almost been out for a decade and you're in that ecosystem you have the aes 50 digital stage box like the s32 or the midas stage box that you could use with the m32 or the x32 if you're in that ecosystem this could be a really great option for you because it's already compatible with that type of protocol but if you're building digital mixing infrastructure from the ground up and you don't have any stage boxes in place you're kind of transitioning from the analog to digital world then i think the choice between these two mixing consoles becomes even harder because then i would actually have you seriously consider the sq5 so now let's talk about this sq5 mixing console this is part of the sq series of allen and heath there's the five there's a six there's a seven and if you're getting the six or seven you're basically paying for just more hardware when it comes to the processing and the channel count that's all the same you can add you know stage boxes to this mixing console and it doesn't matter how many faders we're looking at right here you can of course scroll through the different layers of channels so input count is at 48 channels just like the behringer wing which is plenty of inputs for modern day worship industry when thinking about allen and heath it's important to remember that they make some very very high-end mixing consoles it's their d live series and what they've done here with the sq series and i learned this from my sales rep at sweetwater is they've really taken the high end reliability and functionality and power of their their d live series and they just put in this more compact more affordable form factor for folks who just don't really want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a mixing console or probably can't and don't necessarily need all of the really high-end pro features so you are getting a lot of high-end quality and reliability um in a very compact form factor with this mixing console what i like about this guy in particular being a worship leader at a portable church is just the smaller form factor of course i love all of the faders and buttons and knobs and the big screen on the wing but when i'm in a portable setting like for our church plant i would rather go with this guy it also has a great responsive touch screen interface this one you know it's just pretty easy to navigate i don't think it's quite as quick and responsive as the touch screen interface on the wing but it's still up there in terms of other touch screens i've worked with on digital mixing consoles and similar to the behringer ecosystem of stage boxes allen heath has their own ecosystem of sageboxes that are compatible with this mixing console you could use any of their stage boxes that have the s-link feature it looks like it's an ethercon cable that'll plug into those stage boxes and then you'll have all the inputs and outputs you would ever want and alan heath does have dante capabilities some of their stage boxes have dante built into them and then also they have a input output expansion card right here that you could put a dante expansion card into so that's available and ready to go with the most audio routing options the wing on the other hand does not currently have a dante expansion card available that's as of august of 2020 that could change in the future so just be sure to search sweetwater's website or talk to a sales rep to see if that is available yet if you're going this route and you really need dante capability now i want to get a little bit more hands-on with these mixing consoles to walk you through the differences in how you route audio as well as how you process audio and then how you mix audio so you guys can just get a better feel of the user interface so let's take a look at the audio routing capability here on the behringer wing and this is where they did something that's kind of unique among all digital mixing consoles at least to my knowledge it's pretty unique and that is they've given you the ability to actually label your source inputs probably in outputs as well separately than the way you're actually labeling your channels on the mixing console so with most mixing consoles you know you can go in and you can route your sources into the board you can select you know if it's coming from a usb input or stage box or a local input and then you simply patch whatever source you want to a certain channel fader and then on the channel you label it put a color on the scribble strip etc but here you have another layer of customization so i went to the routing tab here and then you can see i already customized this source input this is local input one on the back of the mixing console just a simple vocal mic i plugged in i can go to customize and then i can you know customize it like i would a regular channel input and i put a name the scribble strip icon and then i can close it out and what's handy about this way of labeling your sources whether it's on your stage box or on the mixing console is that you know what's actually plugged in to that source because sometimes when you when you don't have it labeled that way and you can't see that labeling from the mixing console then you have to like yell at someone on stage be like hey what's plugged into a2 on that stage box and then they have to tell you whereas here if you have someone setting up your gear on stage and plugging things into the stage box they can actually label what exact instrument or microphone is going into these these inputs on the physical piece of hardware and then whoever is mixing audio at the mixing console is going to be able to to go in to their various channels and configure the routing and then actually select what that source is going to be so for example i'm going to select channel number one here the channel strip that i've already customized as my vocal channel and then i'll select that right there and then here are my different source options right so i selected already local number one and we can see this is the source configuration that i customized in the previous setting for what that physical input is is intended for and then that is mapped to this channel and then i could easily go through though and change these however i would like so i really love how i can select one of my channels here and then i can go ahead and dive into the source information where it's actually pulling that audio from i can go and you know select which bank of of audio sources we're wanting to deal with whether that's going to be a aes 50 stage box we don't have one plugged in right now or i could also pull sources from usb audio my usb player and so on there's just a ton of options and they've really made this audio routing intuitive and i like to compare this to the routing on the x32 it's intuitive after you've kind of spent some time wrapping your mind around how it works and whereas this is just kind of the graphically the way the user interface works it just seems like it would take someone a whole lot less time to quickly navigate the routing here the next thing i want to take a look at is just the the signal processing user interface so this is how you're going to adjust the gain the the gate the compressor the eq on any import source input source you have and here i have just a simple dynamic microphone going into channel one so i select the channel here i went to the home page view and all of your channel processing can either be done from the touch screen here or you can use this section of the board over here to go through and you know select which step of the chain you want to adjust and then you have a knob that will adjust each parameter i prefer working in the touch screen because it to me it's just so much more intuitive so i'll go i'll start on top here i can go here and adjust the settings for the actual input source like adding phantom power adjusting the gain right here and with this knob i can adjust the gain that's actually on the preamp and then there's also looks like a digital trim knob as well and then using these little sliders right here i can easily adjust the the balance of the audio if i want it more on the left or the right and then we can also apply delay then moving down the signal processing path i can go to my gate i can engage it by hitting the on button here i really like the the metering and how they visualize this just really intuitive so next we have the eq page where i've got my metering here for all the different frequencies this is where i can adjust my shelves or my bell curves etc or if i click this up here this will bring the filter into view for the high pass or the low pass filter for a loca or a high cut it's easy to engage or disengage those and then we've got the compressor so easily i can adjust the threshold here and then down here we've got the knobs that map to things such as threshold down here as well then ratio the knee attack time hold time release time etc and then the next step down here we have our page for inserts that we can put into this channel so that's another feature that they really packed a ton of effects into this behringer wing so they've got looks like 16 unique effects that we could use and then you know we can use them for whatever we want we could apply them to a mix bus to add parallel compression or verb or we could actually apply a specific effect just to one particular channel so 16 total effects to work with that's awesome and then down here at the bottom of this channels page i've got the the bus sends so i can easily select a particular channel and then now i have these faders i can send to each of these buses so hopefully you could see navigating this touch screen it's very responsive and accurate again i've been on other touch screens where i feel like i have to just like keep pounding on a button until it finally responds to what i want it to do that's not the case here very pleased with that experience so that's the behringer wings user interface that's what their audio routing looks like as well as the channel processing let's take a look at the sq5 now i want to take a look at the audio routing on the sq5 to get to the primary patch bay for that you just go to the input output button right here and then i can select on this side my inputs or my outputs so here i went to my input channels and now i see this really convenient grid where i can pull any of these local inputs on the back of the mixing console and i can patch them to whichever channel i would like and i can easily scroll up or down this so what i did is i patched input one on the back of this mixing console into the vox channel that's right here check one two i see the metering it's coming in and if i had any of the s-link connected stage boxes those would show up right here and again it's a very intuitive patching process you don't have that additional layer though of labeling your sources separately from your channels like you do on the behringer wing so in this case you know if you're at the mixing console trying to make any patching changes from your sources to your channel you'd have to know exactly what number input your device was plugged into on your stage box or the back of the mixing console it wouldn't be labeled there and you can easily patch in your usb inputs here or more importantly usually you're going to be patching your outputs to a computer to do multi-track recording so overall the routing functionality on this guy is pretty straightforward and it's kind of the traditional way of doing things now let's go ahead and talk about the processing in the user interface that we have here so i think the distinctive thing about the sq mixing consoles are these knobs that you have on the left and the right of the screen right here so on the left side we've got our configurations for our preamp for gain and we've got a high pass filter then we've got a noise gate and compressor so it's in a very intuitive order from top to bottom adjusting these different knobs oh then we also have our panning left and right then i'm going to select my vocal channel here check one two so now you guys will see kind of what the metering will look like here as we set this up so i can select the input settings here on the channel and then i can adjust my my gain so we'll see that all happening on the touch screen there's really nothing super ground breaking about this setup but it's very intuitive i like it a lot i'm going to go back to the primary channel processing page here here's our eq page very simple with a high pass filter and then on the right side here this is where i can actually select my high frequencies high mids low mids low frequencies and then i can make any adjustments with different bell curves or shelves etc and i can use the knobs or i can actually use the touch screen to make these changes and i really do like this touch screen it's pretty accurate pretty pretty quick and responsive you obviously don't have as much real estate as the behringer wing so when i'm using this sq5 it just feels very familiar with what one would expect with a digital mixing console whereas the wing it definitely has this newness about it it's a bit more innovative in that user experience so you really gotta kind of pick your preference there do you want to adjust to this kind of new ecosystem the new way they make changes to audio routing and labeling things or do you like the more traditional approach and maybe perhaps the more proven approach to things using the sq5 and that concludes this side-by-side comparison of the wing in the sq5 as i said up front i really don't think you can go wrong with either one of these options a lot of this will come down to perhaps your personal taste of user interface and the type of experience you want there as well as what gear does your church already have are you already kind of in the behringer x32 world you have a lot of gear that's compatible with this are you already in the allen heath world maybe coming from the qu series do you have some of those larger d live stage boxes like that'll be compatible with this it just really kind of comes down to your unique situation and to give you guys my personal preference on which one i would go with right now in august of 2020 i think it would have to be the sq5 and that's for two reasons primarily one being the dante compatibility that it already has so i would just have to get a stage box that has about maybe 16 inputs would be plenty for what we need in our ministry and perhaps the one that has dante built into it i would get that stage box and we would be off and running with this guy and it would be a great choice for us the wing is a bit big it's not ideal for our portable setup and it doesn't have dante compatibility yet it's going to come sometime in the future but we do have behringer stage boxes already so it would have been nice to go this route for that reason so you can see even in my scenario i'm kind of personally conflicted ideally i just want to get both of them and then i can just switch back whenever i want so i don't think you guys can go wrong with either one of these options be sure to check out the links of these products below on sweetwater and talk to your sales rep because they can kind of help you personally think through these choices for your situation as well thanks so much for watching this video if you found it helpful smash that thumbs up button if you feel even less decided on which one you want after this video hit that thumbs up button because you probably just have that analysis paralysis that we kind of get with getting new gear but yeah don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our latest videos to help you grow yourself and grow your church and be sure to check out worship ministry school if you'd like my team to come alongside you to teach you all things church sound running tracks for your worship ministry getting up and running with live streaming we cover it all there so go to worship ministryschool.com to learn more you

Channel: Churchfront

Views: 69,741

Keywords: churchfront, worship leader training, worship ministry school, jake gosselin, worship tech training

Id: acF4HaJKM6A

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020