Console Tour - Allen & Heath SQ5

okay we're going to take a tour through the allen heath sq5 console we're going to look at all the different screens see where the options and controls are on the desk take a look around the surface itself the sq5 is the physically the smallest entry in the sq series there's the sq5 sq6 sq7 they all offer i believe if i'm getting this right 48 channels to mix 48 inputs 12 buses each bus can be an aux or a group and each bus can also be stereo or mono with no loss of channel count in addition there's four additional effects buses that feed the first four of the effect slots of which there are eight total and those effects returns also are in addition to the 48 inputs so the five six and seven all have the same uh input and output capability in terms of the processing uh obviously the biggest difference is the size of the surface so the sq5 i have 16 physical faders plus a master fader and 16 preamps on the back the sq6 has 24 physical faders plus a master fader 24 preamps on the back the sq7 is 32 physical faders plus a master fader and 32 preamps on the back there's also you also stepping up in terms of your your analog outputs um i believe it is 12 on the sq5 14 on the sq6 and 16 on the sk7 but we'll take a look at the back planner later on you can see what else is going on so uh the console itself as you're working with the screen there are all these buttons below the screen and those control the basic different views uh that you'll be working with processing and routing are in green and that's because those are sort of the main two that you're going to be spending most of your time on when you're working with the console up at the top of the screen here it's always showing me which which screen i'm in so processing routing meters effects it's changing the name tells me where i am and over here in this little tab it tells me the currently selected mix and then you have your names of your automation scenes up here and uh when i hit processing notice that i'm seeing eight eight inputs at a time or eight outputs eight channel strips whatever's on the surface and since there are actually 16 on the surface i can swipe and go right across and also my my main master faders there as well so i'm actually seeing 17 strips at any given time and i can just navigate between them so as i select different channels with the select button you'll see the selection hops around on the screen and i will touch anywhere in this channel strip to sort of blow up that view and get into a particular section of the dsp so for example the first thing i can do is touch up at the top and open the channel naming dialog naming and coloring all right there the next section down is the preamp input controls and so you'll notice that now i've got that single channel strip over here on the left side of the screen and i've sort of zoomed in on all the uh input control parameters and stuff so here's where i would one of the ways i can select which input is driving this channel so i can choose from a local socket i can choose from the s-link which is the digital snake port usb the i o port if i have a card installed or the signal generator and then by tapping here and spinning the touch and turn i can choose which one of those local socket inputs should drive this channel very simple here's your phantom power you're going to press and hold which is nice to prevent accidental activation and also notice that when i have this engaged or i have the pad engaged for example or the delay or the polarity it's giving me these little indicators that are up here in the head amp section so when i'm looking at the uh the kind of home screen eight channel processing view which i can get to by pressing processing button again i have those indicators so i can quickly see at a glance uh which of those settings are enabled for a given input so turn my phantom off by holding it down my pad notice that the pad does change the displayed gain setting which is kind of cool there's your your input delay and your polarity and a digital trim or down as well over here i've loaded up what's called the tube stage and that is a optional tube preamp emulator that you can load up on each and every input on the desk if you want which is kind of cool if that weren't there you would see this just your standard preamp but by pressing the library button i can choose to load up the tube stage and this is the same tube stage that you find on the avantus and the d-live and i believe that you can get the tube stage uh free just by registering your desk when you purchase it so you know you can turn it on you can adjust the different type of tube models and these parameters down here and so that's kind of cool so if we move on down next to the next part we have our high pass filter there is a knob on the surface that controls that and we'll again take a look at the surface uh in a bit and there's an on off also right on the surface and i can also come in and do this with the touch and turn on the screen in addition to selecting the slope of the filter that i want my next section down is my gate controls so pretty standard stuff here you've got your attack your hold and release your threshold your gate depth bring the gate in or out and again on the surface i do have a control to adjust the gate threshold and bring the gate in or out this is a histogram which is kind of cool it will show you the gain reduction of the gate over time it's kind of a scrolling time view and what i really like about it is even when the gate is bypassed you will still see the histogram active so you can actually dial in the effect uh before you insert it and of course you can side chain you can key this gate off of another signal if you want or you can just sidechain filter its own signal and bring that filter in and out like that next you have an insert point and so if you are going to do a hardware insert or route it some through a waves rack or something like that this is where you would set the the send and the return and the operating level here and i'll show you another way to do the inserts if you're going to use an onboard insert when we get to the effects rack here's my uh parametric eq i have a four band parametric eq on each of my inputs uh the low and high bands have the option of shelf bell filter or a low pass high pass topology and again i can touch and turn any one of these parameters that i want i can also come onto the surface and choose high high mid low mid or low bands and there are width frequency and gain controls right on the surface as well as a button to bring it in or out you can also hit the rta button and that will turn on the rta overlay which you're not seeing right now simply because i'm not passing any audio through this channel but there are a bunch of settings for that as well next is the compressor section and it's the same thing as as the gate in terms of layout where you've got an rms or peak setting you can choose your attack and release settings you have the option to apply a soft knee ratio threshold gain bring the compressor in or out and change the threshold off the surface again you have your histogram there um so you can see the gain reduction over time which is really helpful and something that i really like is the parallel path so by engaging the parallel path i can bring some dry back in and i can balance the wet and the dry makes it really easy to do parallel compression so those are all the things that are in the channel strip and there's a setting there's an option in the settings where if i grab a knob from another section if i grab my gate if i grab my comp if i grab an eq knob it's going to follow me around and so you don't have to go in and select whatever you want you can also turn that off of course so if we hit processing again we go back to our main eight wide screen so you can see that you can see all that in a glance and you can also tap whatever you want to get into it so those are your two settings for processing and if i hit processing again or i hit i'm in the processing screen with nothing selected it brings me back to this screen where i have some quick options i can shut the console down lock it change the user or go in and change the brightness so that's a nice a little shortcut if you walk up to the desk and you need to quickly be able to adjust the brightness and we're going to look at those brightness settings in a second so our routing button is the next screen and again nothing selected right now so i'm sort of seeing this uh utility screen but as soon as i select something it's the same that we had before where i've got my bank of everything that's on this current layer i can kind of scroll through and then i'm going to get an overview and i can go in and work on the particular sections just by touching them so again here's my direct out settings i can assign to a dca or mute group by simply selecting the member the dcas or mute groups that i want this channel to be a member of um and you can also do this the other way around so if i want to go for example and look at dca4 if i hit the view button here's dca4 and i can select which inputs i want to be a member of that and if i go down you can see i can also add my groups my auxes uh my matrices all that to the dca but you can also name it and do that stuff but you could also do the same thing if you had your dca assigned to your service by just selecting the select button will take you to the same place if we move on down here are the sends so here's my hi-hat channel and where is this going do i want it going to the main is it panned and what's its fader level and for each aux and group for the auxes i can choose pre or post whether or not to send it and then the send level uh for the stereo auxes in addition there's a pan and for my groups of course i'm either switching into the group or i'm not and notice these are all reflected on this little overview graphic here and so that's a really quick way to see where one input is going you can also do a lot of this from the surface and we'll take a look at that so again same thing as processing where you have the kind of overall view and then you've got sort of the detail view so you can go in and look at an individual thing meters shows you obviously all the meters on the console the first screen is all your input meters so here's your your input channels there's 48 inputs and you see that the last four right now are configured as stereo pairs of inputs you also have a gate indicator and a comp indicator in addition to the signal level here's your effects meters so the way i've got it set up right now is four uh my four effects buses sending into these first four effects and i have eight stereo effects returned so these other four i can use i can drive them with other buses i can use them as insert effects or whatever i want to do the mix meters is the same thing here are my groups here are my auxes i see my main left right and then my three matrices so obviously you can tell by the meters which ones are currently configured as mono and stereo usb meters um this desk is really cool in that you can do stereo playback and recording right off the usb uh and multi-track back and record it right off the usb port on the desk if you want to put in removal storage or you can set the usb mode to talk to a computer and sort of more traditional sound card type of function so there's a couple different ways to get audio in and out of the desk via the usb functionality and here you have your meters for your inputs and your outputs there as well as telling you how everything's patched which is pretty cool there's an rta so this is obviously reminiscent of a traditional 31 band third octave graphic eq our spectrum analyzer and so you can see that and there are some settings down here for the ballistics of the meter and how it's going to follow you around the desk or be fixed to a certain channel and you can either make it stereo or mono and lastly you have some settings for the channel meter so the channel meters on this console instead of a more traditional led ladder on each channel which takes up a lot of space there's a single led which can do a bunch of different colors they call it the chromatic metering and so here's where you can set the thresholds for each color that it's going to sort of move through depending on what the level of the audio is and it's very customizable you have a lot of options here to choose how that's going to behave and also a couple of different variable ways that it behaves with threshold and i actually really like this feature and i found that it gives me a lot of information with a single led so i think that's pretty cool next we'll look at the effects screen so you can see down the left side of your screen here you have eight effects rack slots and so for each one we also have a front and a back so the front is where you're going to adjust the parameters for the effect itself and the back is where you're going to set your routing so for each one it can be either if we look at the back panel again it can be either a mix return effect or an insert effect or it could be unassigned so right now i can choose which effects n is driving this if i want to instead make this an insert i'll do it on an empty rack so let's go to empty rack make this insert i want to insert that it's on my lead vocal channel which is going to be 21 so i just simply spin the knob bang and i'm inserted and that's it and so that's really really fast and really easy especially compared to some of the other consoles i've worked on where this can be a little bit of a chore if we go back to the front panel you can see we don't have anything loaded right now i'm going to press that library button again and here's where i kind of go through and select all the effects i have reverbs delays modulators i have a gated reverb that's kind of cool let's take a let's take a look at that one i'm going to hit recall there's my gated reverb again with all your parameters that you can load up um and so now um another thing that i really like is you can also this is not a great example because it's an insert effect but we do have uh whether or not we want to engage that insert we have a meter we have a dry wet control um i can press this guy to get the parametric equalizer without having to go find that so if we look at something like this reverb which is being fed from a bus and returned to an effects return i really like this because i can solo the bus that's feeding this processor i can look at its signal level i can mute it i can adjust the fader and then same thing for the return i have all this stuff available to me without having to go find it on the console and i think that's pretty cool so there's your effects rack if we go over to the scenes menu this is where you can scroll through your list of scenes and you can load a scene store scene delete a scene you can apply a recall filter to a particular scene and so you can obviously say that certain scenes aren't allowed to recall certain parameters if we go to the global filter this is where you can globally block scenes from recalling certain types of parameters on the desk so right now the patch and the preamp won't change regardless of what scene i recall and there's a good number of options there for how you want to customize that and of course you have a per object safe so i can save out an entire input channel or save out an entire effects return or save out an entire mix and prevent the automation system from making any changes so maybe if i'm doing my pa processing on my matrices i can save these three and now those will be totally unaffected by the scene recall next menu is the setup menu and you can see we have all these tabs across the left so the first tab is the audio tab and here are all the different screens for the audio settings first i have my paffle or uh it's the cue bus your solo bus right now you have a bunch of settings for that is it going to be additive is it going to when i half all a different channel was going to select it automatically if i bank to a different mix is the powerful going to follow does the input override a mix powerful and do when i have nothing solo do i want to hear my left right in that bus yes or no right and then you have after fader or pre-fader for both your inputs and your outputs you can route an external source into your baffle bus so if you have a comms or a shout or something like that as you want coming through in your monitors you can wrap that in there there's also the ability to uh control that preamp or trim or whatever on that external input that you're bringing in so those controls are there here you can choose the tap off point for where you want to solo that signal in the chain you can trim it you can of course delay it and then listen level which is like sort of the overall level of the power bus so you can think of it like sort of your master monitor uh your q level fader and there's a function that we'll see in a bit to put that on your master fader if you're doing a monitor mixing application this is the talkback options there's actually a local socket on the back of the desk so in addition to the 16 preamps that drive the input channels there's also another preamp dedicated for talkback and so here's where you can choose where you want that source to come from you have of course your preamp controls you can pad it you can do phantom power you can choose the gain you can choose the trim and there's a high pass and also a momentary and latch feature which is really nice which means this dedicated talk button here if i touch it once it's going to latch and if i hold it down and then release it'll shut itself off which is pretty cool um and this is where you want to route that talkback signal so if i do this where do i want which buses do i want that to go do i want it to go to the pa do i want it to go to a matrix whatever signal generators over here and you have a couple options for signal you have sine wave you have white noise pink noise and band pass noise you have a mute control you have a level control there's a little meter for it and again where do you want that signal to go and if i send it to main left right of course you can see it there on the meters i'm going to turn that off just so it doesn't bother me audio sync sets where the console clocks to and the sample rate of the aes outputs on the desk so you can clock to another console you can clock off an i o card if you've got a dante card or something like that the i o port is on the back of the console which we'll see um there's a dante card there's a waves card there's a bunch of different cards that ellen heath offers to put in this console and so this is if you had a card installed where you would uh configure that card and the usb screen so this is where you have two choices for how the usb on the console operates the usb b mode is the port on the back shows up to your computer as a sound card i believe it's 32 by 32 and so you can do virtual sound check into your daw you can uh you can multi-track recording to your daw so on and so forth alternatively sq drive switches on the recording and playback from the usb port that's on the surface of the desk you can set the sample rate to 48k if you don't uh feel like recording at 96k and eating up all your hard drive space and that's where you do that the surface menu you see we have some options here first of all strip assign this is something you're going to want to get familiar with so there are six banks of faders on the desk a through f and for each one they are fully customizable so you can put anything anywhere you like which is something that i feel a little bit spoiled by now when i go back to work on consoles that don't have this so if i want to replace input 16 here with maybe my first reverb return all i would do is simply drag that away and let it go i'm gonna go over on the top are the things all the things i can put down there so i'm gonna go to my effects i'm gonna get my effects one return and drop it there and i'm done i've now put my snare verb return on the surface and so you can customize what is where and i think that's pretty cool as well here's your input choices all your 48 inputs all right your effects sends and returns your mixes so that's all your groups and your auxes your main left right and your matrices and then you have eight dcas and matrix excuse me uh midi channels so if you're using this as a daw controller you can map these and make a control surface in your daw which is kind of cool and it certainly beats mixing using a mouse or a trackball in my opinion soft controls will set uh there are a number of soft controls on the surface on this console there are eight uh buttons there are eight soft keys on the sq6 sq7 you gain additional soft keys and you also get some soft rotaries so you can use your rotaries to do fader levels and reverb returns and stuff like that so for each one you simply select the control and you go into this menu and there are a ton of options for what you want that button to do so you may want it to mute a certain channel fire off a mute group mute vca you can have it spill a vca i really like this i can have it spill a particular vca and then you can actually take that dca off the surface so it basically acts like a pop group or a spill set or you can have spill on select so when i select a given vca on the surface it'll spill those channels out for me so that's kind of then the button would then toggle that feature on and off so there's a lot of different things you can do with the key the soft keys foot switch controls i've never been one for a foot switch but if you're going to plug a foot switch into the desk again you can choose from a lot of options for what you want that thing to do and surface preferences so there's another screen that you're going to be hopefully familiar with because there's a lot of cool options on it these are you know when you load a scene do we want to confirm that do you want to be able to control the preamp right from the surface there's the gain knob here do you want to initially save the patching and i'll talk about that when we get to the patching screen this is the setting i was talking about earlier where do the processing screens follow the surface control so if i'm working on a compressor and then i grab a gate knob do i want the display to automatically switch over to the gate view or do i have to manually select it [Music] same thing with having the parametric eq bands follow what i'm working with on the screen and i really like effects screen follow select which is cool um if i have two channels and they each have an insert effect on them and us i'm looking at the maybe i have a dynamic eq on my two lead singers i'm looking at lead singer one's dynamic eq and then i press the select button for lead singer two the effects screen will automatically switch over to that other effects rack and show me the proper effect which saves me a lot of time you can choose the units for the delay on the desk milliseconds meters feet or samples and if you choose you know meters or feet it's going to give you an opportunity to put in the temperature as well and over here is your brightness controls and again you can shortcut to these brightness controls by hitting that processing button a couple times or getting to that processing screen where there's nothing selected so you can shortcut right to this um touchscreen brightness actually goes really bright i'm not going to turn it up because it makes the camera have trouble seeing but i had no issue seeing this outside the other day when i was in sunlight leds on the surface your channel strip lcds down here uh those also go like really satisfyingly bright the light bar is this guy that's up here under the hood and you can turn that off or fade it in and then you have the balance it goes from white to this purpley congo blue type of color and anywhere in between if we go to mixer config you see we have a couple options here this is where you choose to make stereo pairs out of your inputs since this is an fpga operation it's reconfiguring the fpga inside the desk it does interrupt audio briefly so don't try to do this during the show there's also the ganging function which is very similar to a stereo pair actually has even better functionality in my opinion so i'll show you that when we get there on the mix stereo you can individually make each mix mono or stereo so i can have all my 12 buses be mono or stereo if i want to and again this does interrupt audio so you want to decide that before but what's cool is i don't lose any channel counts so i can go from 12 model mixes 12 stereo mixes and i still have 12 buses to work with and i'm not pairing pairs of buses together to get stereo and of course your matrices down here so then you would hit apply and off you go bus config is where you choose out of my 12 buses how many should be groups and how many should be auxes so if you aren't using any groups if you don't like to mix groups you can have 12 boxes you can have them all groups or anywhere in between again that is going to cause audio interruption because you're reconfiguring the fpga and finally roll so if you want to reset the desk you can choose uh one of two basic templates here that you can see and just hit reset to zero that out master fader mode usually by default mix master is when i select a certain mix on the console that master fader is always going to give me the master level control for whatever mix i have selected but in listen level that turns into the master listen level fader so if you're a monitor mixer or you're doing broadcast or something and you're queuing off of that uh paffle bus there's where you can set the fader to do that if you want here's the ganging screen so you see across the top i have eight gangs and for each of the eight gangs i can choose what i want to be a member of that game so for example maybe my two guitar inputs i drag them down here and i can have up to 12 members of each so if there was you know maybe i'll put this the mandolin in there as well and then i can choose what gets ganged so maybe i just want to keep the faders together but i want different eqs and i want different mutes right and then you can hit apply and now um these parameters are going to be linked for those channels and so you get eight gangs and what i like about that is it gives you a lot more flexibility than a stereo pair and you can do it live during the show here's a network setup where you have giving your ip address to the console either dynamic or static and you can name the console turn your dhcp server on or off so if you're going to connect to the console for the network you're going to use the smartphone app or an ipad or whatever here's where you can set that up and finally in the user screen you can specify 10 users plus the admin you can pass or protect these user accounts you can restrict certain users to a certain range of scenes that they're allowed to recall so if you run a house of worship and you have some volunteers there and you only want them to be able to recall certain scenes for their service you can do that and of course you have three full tabs of permissions so you can come in here and you can um allow or disallow a particular user uh to do different things on the console should we get so they can't load a show or they can't overwrite a scene or they can't change out your effects or uh they can't access a certain layer or something like that which is uh it's a pretty powerful feature if you have multiple users on your console and it's sometimes unattended you have to really worry about someone messing up your your scene finally we go to the utility menu uh so in the general tab we have some just diagnostics you can see what's going on with the desk you can calibrate your faders you have midi uh playback controls if you're using this with a daw this is kind of cool transport controls um the add-ons are the additional processing that you can choose to add to your desk so if you like the vintage compressors or you like a certain model of graphic eq i am a big fan of the dynamic eq so you can sort of pick and choose a la carte if you want any of this additional processing and you can enter the code here and away you go the data menu is exactly what it sounds like it's where i can input import shows from usb i can export shows to usb i can also export particular scenes if i want to and save some library so i have some preset effects libraries for my artist dynamic eqs for example so i can just export those particular presets and sync is where if you're going to connect the console to a tablet or something like that you can choose are we pushing are we pulling how are those going to sync each other usb utility is here to help you format the usb stick into a format that the console can read and write to you can look at the capacity and how much free space you have on that you can also use this screen to update the firmware on the console sq drive is the stereo or multi-track recording and playback capability of these consoles i use the stereo to just record my main bus for rehearsal tapes and you have record play stop pause there and you can see how long it's been recording how much space you have left on the stick which is really helpful and also the load on the usb you can make sure you're not going to overwhelm your storage and it's the same thing here multi-track i've got uh 16 channels of record and playback to a usb storage which i think is pretty neat and finally you have an automatic mic mixer here so um this is the overview you also have you can assign uh which inputs you want to either of the two mic mixers and you can also set it to have two separate mixers or one really big mic mixer so now i have kind of the big mama there and in the setup screen this is where you're setting some of the side chain filter parameters and stuff like that and bringing the whole mixer in or out if we go to the i o page you'll see that we have a little bit of stuff going on here this is where i patch my inputs this is where i patch my outputs and this is where i patch my tie lines so my inputs i can choose am i patching my input channels on the desk or am i patching my external inputs to my mix busses and this is where you choose that and you can move this around and this is choosing okay well right now i'm looking at the local inputs being patched into my input channels but i can also patch them off the snake the s-link snake can bring them in from usb for the virtual soundcheck or something like that or the i o port again that i don't have a card in it's really nice that it's initially protected against patching with a touch so if i touch this it's going to say hey do you want to do this and i can hit yes or no so this patch button is that patching safe operation so once i hit that now i can touch and i can patch to patch or unpatch and the interesting thing is if i want to do a really quick one-to-one patch um i can just press and hold for the first point and then i can turn the touch and turn and let it go and i've just done a one-to-one patch really quick which i think is great the outputs is the same thing we can patch the mix outputs we can do a direct output from the input channels you can choose where do you want to patch the rack effect outputs or your monitor outputs and again you have the options to patch them to local outputs to the snake to the emmy personal mixers uh the usb port or the i o card if you have one installed and finally tie lines uh which i really like tie lines are sort of a point-to-point routing feature that doesn't really use up any dsp in the desk so for example um i could use the local inputs here um we could do a split snake where i have this console add monitors and i have another sq series console or an advantage or whatever out at a house and i can just say okay i want to take all the inputs straight off the local inputs here and i want to split them out via the s-link to the other console so by doing that i can do a quick one-to-one patch go like that 22 local inputs why not so now these local inputs um they're tie lines so they're going to go straight out to the snake and i'm not patching direct doubts from channels so it has nothing to do with the dsp that i'm doing on the desk or the process that i'm doing in my show file it's simply patching one point to another point so i can also do usb to s-link and i can take playback uh virtual soundcheck that's coming in right off the computer send it right out the s-link port to another console or something like that which is kind of cool and so there's a lot of flexible stuff that you can do in the i o menu all right onward now let's take a look at the console surface itself so obviously here's the screen where we were working before on the left side of the screen you have preamp control that's your gain level you got a high pass level excuse me a high pass frequency and filter in and out you have your gate threshold gate in and out you have your comp threshold comp in and out there's a peak indicator here if anything in your input this is peaking at the preamp there and peaking i believe at the end of the signal chain there anywhere and the signal chain will show up there you have a pan knob down here you've got your user assigned keys there's six here uh there's two more soft keys over here so there's eight soft keys on this console on the sq6 you're adding a couple more plus some encoders and the sq7 has even more here's your talkback uh toggle this is your touch and turn encoder here we've got our eq you get your four bands of eq plus width frequency and gain control for each there's your peaking for your eq uh eq in and out obviously your your main meters are there up here is a stereo input three that's a eighth inch trs so you can do a smartphone mp3 player whatever you want to do there just kind of convenient to have it on the surface and as you'll see there are two more stereo inputs on the back that are quarter inch trs usb port for storage show files and of course recording multi-track playback your headphone jack your headphone level control this geq fader flip button is if i'm selected into a bus that has a graphic eq on it that'll flip the gq to the faders um so uh if we let's go to i've selected my uh my main bus now so if i hit gq fader flip it's bringing that geq right to my faders if i press it again it brings me the top half of the frequency range press it a third time and i'm back and you see the in here is lit up because the geq is enabled and if i take the gq out that goes away down the right side of the console i have my bus my mix selectors so here's uh you're just pressing one to flip into that mix and the master fader here is going to become the master symbol for that mix so mix one two three you're just flipping through your mixes there and it's always showing you in the in the corner of the screen where you're flipped into and these are your effects your 4fx buses so all in all you've got your 12 buses here plus your 4fx buses and then obviously your main left right on the left side of the surface this view button is kind of neat so by default we're looking at whatever name and color we've given the channel if you press view one time it shows you the actual identity of the channel so this is an input one that's effects return one if i press it twice it's showing me where that source is coming from so l1 is a local one so it's really easy to see without having to go to your i o screen see what's patched in from where where things are going on the console down here are your six layer selects a through f i have copy paste and reset so those are pretty cool so if i wanna if i have uh my eq on my kick like this i want to copy that to my snare for whatever terrible reason i want to do that i can do copy select and now it says i've copied my kick processing and then i can do paste and touch that and now i've pasted that eq to my kick channel i can also reset uh you can also copy paste individual parameters so i can do copy high pass filter i can do copy gate i could do copy compressor my bird is upset i could do copy eq you can also copy an interval individual band off the eq so i can do copy low mid off the eq so uh and the reset works the same way so reset low mid on the eq copy low mid off this eq and paste it to let's paste it here so you can be really granular you can pull just a single element of your eq out or you're just your compressor just your gate or you can copy paste the whole signal configuration or you can even copy and mix contributions from one bus to another bus so that's a pretty cool feature also kind of a little easter egg if you hold down reset and tap the top of a fader it goes to negative infinity if you hold down reset and tap the bottom of a fader they go to unity and i do like that as well over here you have pre-fade assign and channel to all mix so channel to all mix is exactly what it sounds like so for starting our sound check and here's snare top and i can just say all right who wants snare in their wedges i hold down channel to all mix and now i can bring that snare channel into all of my mixes like that assign chooses whether or not a channel is assigned to the bus so since i have left right selected here if i hold down a sign by doing this i'm routing those inputs out of the main now they're not in the main mix and if i flip over to a group i want to add these inputs to my drum group i can hold down a sign now i'm adding them to the drum group of course i could always go into the routing and i can see that there where it's going and where it's not going but you can do it right from the surface there pre-fade is the same thing so if i'm into a mix bus here if i hold down pre-fade now i can see that in mix one these inputs are going with their pre-fade and now they're post fade so you can really quickly do routing into and out of groups into and out of buses pre-fader post fader right from the surface without having to go into the menu which i think is pretty cool and uh let's now just take a quick look at the back okay here we are around the back of the console so to start off with i have 16 local pre-amps plus a 17th one that by default is for my talkback but of course can be patched to something else if i want below that i have my 12 local analog xlr outputs i have an additional pair of outputs as trs here and i have an aes digital output a foot switch connector two pairs of additional stereo inputs uh stereo one stereo two left and right and of course stereo three was that eighth inch jack on the front there's the power switch there's the power inlet there's a nice little power led on the back this is an io port slot so if you're going to add a dante card or a wave card or any of the alan heath proprietary networking cards that's going to go there there's a usb 2.0 b slot and that's to connect to a computer if you want to do virtual soundcheck or playback or recording or anything like that a network port to connect to your network so you can use the ipad app or whatever you want to do there's also a sq for you app i think it's called and so you can um give your singer like a more me knob on her phone or whatever she wants to just turn the lead vocal up and the sq link port is uh the point-to-point networking so that's how you connect to a stage box or another console so on and so forth all right so that's the sq5 in a nutshell hopefully that answers some questions and that's it

Channel: Precision Audio Services

Views: 32,100

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Id: VoFTBzALWVc

Length: 40min 5sec (2405 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/insclevernamehere92]

I bit the bullet and picked up an sq5 a few weeks ago. I wasn't really looking to purchase, but it was a local sale and too good to pass on.

The desk is solid, customizable, and super easy to use. With it's size and channel count, it replaces both my x32 rack and (shudder) ls9, while being something I can easily flip and move on my own. As soon as those are sold, I'll probably spring for a gx4816, which then opens the door for the eventual purchase of an Avantis when things are going better.

My only qualm is the purchase structure of the add-ons. If I were to buy a second sq, I'd need to pay for everything again.

[u/IHateTypingInBoxes]

One thing I failed to mention was that the stock channel compressors can be swapped out for a variety of optional vintage compressor emulations on every input and output. Although the stock compression is quite good, the vintage ones are really fun and well worth the upgrade in my opinion.

[u/showcontroller]

I’ve found the SQ series to be pretty intuitive. I was able to teach some people on it as their first board, and they got everything pretty quickly. Really a good board; just wish I had one for myself.