New QSC Touchmix

[almeriastrings]

24 Mic preamps...32 track direct to disc recording facility...16 Aux outs...

http://www.qsc.com/index.php?id=6782

Input trims are still manual (no full recall), however.

[ferrousgeek]

Yowza, that looks tempting! The est. street price is a bit out of my budget right now. I'm guessing we'll be seeing a lot of mixers with direct MTK capability in the near future. I've been pretty close to pulling the trigger on the Soundcraft Sig 12 MTK (analog with Ghost Pres), but may wait to see what other digital offerings are released. A board that can be used for live sound, as well as an AI in a project studio is very attractive to me.

[Charlieshafer]

If it's studio use, it's hard to beat the flexibility of the digital mixers. I use analogue, but only for live sound, and it's a fixed system. The little traveling board I use is the signature 10, but that's just for reliability when there's no wifi or potential connectivity issues. The QSC's look very interesting to say the least...

[almeriastrings]

They are a very good sounding board, live. Very clean. Easy to use, and very reliable. Logical, easy workflow (unlike some I could mention). My one and only gripe with them in a live context is that the pres are not fully recallable. For many (a single band or couple of acts) this won't matter - but if you have lots of stage changes, at a festival, for example, the beauty of full recall becomes evident very quickly. So fast to re-assign and re-purpose inputs. For that kind of job, I'd probably look hard at the A&H QU-SB.

For single bands and more limited needs to do stage changes, though, the Touchmix's are very nice.

How this new one would be for studio use, I'm not so sure... no hardware inserts, and we have yet to hear how the A/D conversion stands up against other current options.... from what I can see it is limited to 44.1 and 48kHz and given the architecture this based on, latency could be a real issue. Also, as far as I can tell right now, no DAW control either. Quite a lot of compromises there.

I believe some things are still being finalized, so stuff could change.

[foldedpath]

How this new one would be for studio use, I'm not so sure... no hardware inserts, and we have yet to hear how the A/D conversion stands up against other current options.... from what I can see it is limited to 44.1 and 48kHz and given the architecture this based on, latency could be a real issue. Also, as far as I can tell right now, no DAW control either. Quite a lot of compromises there.

Yeah, I don't see this as a studio mixer and I don't think it's intended for that market. If it's limited to 44.1/48k that's a problem. Not that I think it makes a huge difference, but many studios are now operating on higher rates for capture and mixing. Given the quality of A/D conversion these days, I don't think that would be a major drawback, but not being able to use outboard preamps for "color," high gain, or impedance options (for ribbons) would be an issue in most studio scenarios.

As a live mixer though, I like this series.