Allen & Heath Qu-Pac 35-Channel Rackmountable Digital Mixer

Description

When it comes to sound mixing, new technologies have forever blurred the lines between “live” and “studio” mixers. And given that you’re likely to be performing your craft from just about anywhere these days, this makes perfect sense: Allen & Heath made the Qu-Pac for you. Juiced with five cores of high-efficiency ARM core processing, this desktop/rackmount unit takes the power of the A&H’s Qu mixers and shoehorns it into a super-compact format that suits your busy schedule. Qu-Pac lets you mix from your iPad, but the mixer’s full firepower can also be deployed via the front panel and touchscreen. Equipped with custom settings and Cat 5expansion up to 38 inputs, the Allen & Heath Qu-Pac gives you a scalable, flexible, failsafe sound-mixing solution.

The Qu-Pad app gives you freedom

Add Allen & Heath’s Qu-Pad iPad app to your rig and you’ll have the freedom to adjust your monitors from onstage, tweak the PA while roaming about the venue, then mix the show from FoH. Qu-Pad connects to the Qu-Pac via Wi-Fi and gives you instant access to all live mixing settings and parameters. Whether you’re mixing your band live, recording in the studio, or you’re in charge of setting up a permanent sound installation for your school, church, or company conference hall — you’ll find the Allen & Heath Qu-Pac to be an outstanding solution that’s at once flexible, scalable, and rock-solid reliable.

Touchscreen control speeds up your workflow

The Allen & Heath Qu-Pac rocks a 16-million-color, 800 x 480 touchscreen with an integrated data encoder – the core of a user interface that gives you quick and easy access to all your settings. Designed for clarity, the user-friendly interface has dedicated keys and screen tabs that let you quickly get to your meter and RTA views, effects racks, channel processing, USB audio control, setup menus, scenes, and much more. The Qu-Control key serves up a fully customizable screen which gives you access to user- and application-specific channels and settings. “Widgets” for channel levels, mutes, and assignment activation may be assigned to the page. User permissions and the customizable Qu-Control screen make Qu-Pac safe and convenient for daily use by non-technical volunteer staff.

AnalogiQ preamps and 24-bit conversion, for warm, musical sound

Allen & Heath fortified the Qu-Pac with 16 of their superb AnalogiQ total-recall preamps. Featuring phantom power, zero crossing detection, and a unique padless 1dB-step gain stage, the preamps are married to the DSP for optimum transparency and gain accuracy. The analog signal is captured by high-quality, low-latency 24bit A-D converters matched to high-grade 24bit D-A converters. A&H has spent considerable time refining the AnalogiQ design so it gives you stellar transparency, with minimum distortion and a vanishingly low noise floor. But how do these preamps sound? Take it from Sweetwater, they’re delightfully analog-sounding – warm and musical.

dSnake has you future-proofed

Allen & Heath’s Qu mixers are self-contained; if you already have analog cables, you’re ready to rock. If you’re thinking of ditching the copper multicore for a Cat 5e digital snake, however, the Qu-Pac’s dSnake port has you future-proofed. A&H’s proprietary networking protocol supports a combination of AR2412, AR84, or portable AB168 AudioRacks, and boasts a transport latency of only 105 microseconds over cable runs of up to 390′. So if you’re mixing FoH, you can place your I/O on the stage and run a single Cat 5e cable back to your Qu mixer in the mix position. Sleek, convenient – and fast!

iLive FX sourced from A&H’s pro touring boards

The dynamics and FX algorithms onboard Qu-Pac are sourced from the FX used in Allen & Heath’s iLive pro touring boards. iLive FX are used by many top audio engineers instead of plug-ins and outboard effects units. Qu-Pac — as do all Qu models — rocks four stereo iLive FX engines chock full of expertly crafted emulations of legendary reverbs, delays, modulators, flangers, and more. What’s more, this impressive FX library can grow with future firmware releases. Effects are returned to the mix on dedicated stereo return channels (each with a dedicated 4-band PEQ), so you don’t have to tie up your input channels.

Power-packed with smart features

If anyone knows live mixing, Allen & Heath does. That’s why they’re able to load the Qu-Pac with smart features you’ll come to rely on, night after night. Like a built-in interface that streams multitrack audio to your Mac or PC via a flexible patching system. Or the integrated multitrack USB recorder that gives you 18 channels of 48kHz, 24bit recording and playback straight to and from your USB hard drive. Impressive? How about every channel being outfitted with Channel Ducker, which provides auto signal attenuation for an endless number of applications? Or compatibility with A&H’s ME Personal Mixing System? This lets any number of optional ME-1 personal mixers be chained from Qu-Pac’s dSnake port (or from an AR2412 / AB168 AudioRack, if you’ve got one connected), giving each performer control over his or her own mix and leaving the engineer free to concentrate on the audience experience.