QSC TOUCHMIX-16 DIGITAL MIXER

FLYING BLIND

I decided, ‘being a man’, to just wing it with the TouchMix-16 and see how far I could get with­out need­ing to look at any form of man­ual. This would put to test the design of the sys­tem. There is noth­ing worse than get­ting in front of a new dig­i­tal con­sole and hav­ing to scratch your head when you realise the min­i­mum require­ments for oper­at­ing the sys­tem are at least three years of ter­tiary study and a pocket full of cheat notes. For­tu­nately, this wasn’t the case with the Touch­Mix. It’s very well laid out and com­pletely approach­able to any­one that’s used to work­ing with mostly ana­logue con­soles. Inputs and out­puts are all where they should be. The trans­port con­trols are pretty obvi­ous too. It all comes down to work­ing with the touch screen that is also laid out in an intu­itive manner.

FAST RESULTS

This is what you should expect from a dig­i­tal mix­ing con­sole. It should be quick and easy to oper­ate and this process should also be improved upon con­sec­u­tive uses. For use as a basic line mixer, just about any­one could oper­ate this unit with­out the need to ref­er­ence the man­ual, and once you get into the guts of it, it is still pretty straight­for­ward. This is not to say it lacks in fea­tures. You get gate, com­pres­sion, high-pass fil­ter and a 4-bandEQ on every input chan­nel to start with, so it is easy to get the sound some­where near where you want it with­out get­ting too technical.

With 16 XLR inputs on the top panel as well as a pair of stereo inputs, this will cater for a large range of appli­ca­tions. On the rear panel, along with the mas­ter out­put, you get 6 aux­il­iary sends, all on XLR con­nec­tions. I love this, it makes run­ning indi­vid­ual fold back sends to pow­ered speak­ers so easy. Plus, there are two more stereo aux­il­iary sends on TRS con­nec­tions on the top panel. This unit has pretty much every­thing most bands will ever need to oper­ate their own PA sys­tem. It’s a big two thumbs up from me.