The Allen & Heath Qu-Pac Digital Mixer is a super compact desk or rack mount mixer that has the power and great quality of Allen & Heath's Qu family. The Qu-Pack frees you to mix from anywhere in the venue via an iPad, although you can access the full functions of the mixer from the front panel and touch screen.
At the heart of the Qu-Pac is a 5-inch, 800 x 400, sixteen million colour touch screen that provides super-fast, easy access to all the mixers settings. This user-friendly interface has dedicated keys and screen tabs allowing you to quickly find RTA views, FX racks, channel processing, USB audio control, scenes, setup menus and many more. A fully customisable screen is accessed via a Qu-Control key, giving you access to channels and settings tailored to the user and application. Several widgets can be assigned to this page including assignment on/off switches channel levels, mutes that are all arranged to suit user requirement.
The Qu-Pac features Allen & Heath's AnalogiQ total recall preamps . They achieve zero crossing detection and feature an advanced padless 1dB step gain stage, that's closely allied to the DSP for perfect gain accuracy and audio clarity. Low latency 24bit analogue to digital converters, that are matched to high quality 24bit digital to analogue converters to provide the right outputs, capture the analogue signal. The design of the AnalogiQ has been refined to offer transparency, minimal distortion and an ultra-low noise floor.
Qu mixers are all cross compatible with each other. If you have the analogue cables that come with Qu mixers, you're good to go. But this copper multicore has been transformed into a Cat5 digital snake that connects to the Qu-Pacs dSNAKE port. Via this port, you can connect to a combination of Allen & Heath AudioRacks including the AR2412, AR84 or portable AB168. The dSNAKE connection boasts a transport latency of just 105us over cable runs of up to 120m.
The Qu-Pac features four stereo iLive FX engines, featuring crafted emulations of legendary classic reverbs, gated reverbs, delays, modulators, flangers and more. This effects library can grow with future firmware releases. Effects are returned to the mix on dedicated return channels, meaning your tying up your mono and stereo input channels. Each stereo effects return has its own dedicated 4 band PEQ.
The Qu-Pac features USB audio streaming, allowing you to stream multi-track audio straight to your Mac or PC via a patching system. The main LR and all input channels can be recorded either at the same time or you can choose to record something different. The returns from the computer can be assigned to the input channels. The interface works on both Windows and Mac OS X and it will recognized straightaway by any DAW supporting ASIO or Core Audio, including Logic, Cubase, Reaper, and Pro Tools.
As well as this, the Qu-Pac features an integrated multitrack USB recorder that allows you to fully record what the mixer outputs. With 18 channels of kHz, 24bit recording and playback straight to/from your USB hard drive, capturing multitrack recordings has never been so easy. Effects returns and mixes can be alongside channels, and whatever you've captures can be played back to the mixer for virtual sound-checks.
With 5 cores of high efficiency ARM core processing, the Qu-Pac is a very powerful device. Several of these ARM cores are dedicated to running the touch screen display and surface, USB streaming, Qu-Drive multi-channel USB recording / playback and Ethernet. A DSP farm takes full advantage of next generation dual core DSPs. Tailored to specific algorithms, the DSP architecture has varied bit depths with 48 bits on critical EQ functions and a 56 bit accumulator on the mix bus. With plenty of DSP power, the Qu-Pac is future-proof and has ample room for updates and extra functionality.
The main features of the Allen & Heath Qu-Pac Digital Mixer include:
- 16 acclaimed AnaLOGIQ recallable preamps
- 16 on-board Mic / Line Inputs (XLR / TRS)
- Expandable up to 38 inputs via dSNAKE
- 3 Stereo Inputs (TRS)
- 32 Mono + 3 Stereo Input Channels
- 12 on-board Mix Outputs (XLR)
- 4 Stereo Groups
- 2 Stereo Matrix Outs
- AES Digital Out
- 4 DCA Groups
- 4 Mute Groups
- Qu-Pad iPad App for all live mixing controls
- Qu-You iPhone App for personal monitoring
- Qu-Drive direct Multitrack Recording / Playback on USB drives
- 15 Soft Keys
- 16 Custom Select keys
- Qu-Control custom screen to suit application
- 4 FX Engines
- 4 FX Sends / Returns
- 32 × 32 USB Audio Interface
- 5” Touchscreen
- iLive FX Library
- Compatible with ME Personal Mixing System
- Trim, polarity, HPF, gate, insert / ducker, 4-band PEQ, compressor and delay on all Inputs
- Insert, 4-band PEQ, 1/3 octave GEQ, compressor and delay on all Mix outputs
- Built-in Signal Generator
- RTA with Peak Band indication