ALLEN & HEATH SQ SERIES Digital Console
When Allen & Heath entered the Battle of the 32s with its Qu-32, it did so in a real Allen & Heath way. Behringer had made its play with the X32 — stuffing every ounce of processing into a package fronted by a crowded screen. Then Behringer’s now-sister company, Midas retooled much of that tech with a ‘Bentley-designed’ chassis that didn’t make huge strides in operability, nor did it turn it into a ‘real’ Midas.
All of the 32s were ‘bridging’ consoles. Fully digital desks, with a full complement of onboard analogue I/O. That way, anyone with existing analogue infrastructure didn’t have to rewire a single cable, drop box, or core if they didn’t want to. They could simply replace their analogue console with a digital one, and lose a rack of outboard gear in the process.
Knowing this, Allen & Heath straddled this analogue/digital divide on the Qu-32 surface side, too. You still had to get out the white ‘lecky’ and chinagraph to label up your channels, it had big buttons on its touchscreen, loads of colour, and there weren’t too many layers to get your head around. If you came from an analogue console background, this was about as ‘at home’ as you could feel on digital.
NEXT IN QU-EUE
The Qu series was a raging success; not only was it easy to use, but it had plenty of clarity, too.
In the meantime, Allen & Heath overhauled the top end of its digital range with the D-Live series; introducing 96k sampling rates, almost doubling the channel count of iLive, and building more professional interfaces and
