Enhanced Capabilities
Pizzo’s quest for upgrading the street’s consoles ultimately led him to discovering the Allen & Heath SQ-7. While he hadn’t really stood behind an A&H board since the early days of his career, that situation was about to change.
“The year before we had a chance to use Allen & Heath’s dLive desks for a few shows,” he recounts, “and we absolutely loved those. When the opportunity arose for us to test drive the SQ-7, we took it, and quickly discovered it had similar sonic qualities and the functionality we had found with the dLive. It didn’t take any arm-twisting to make the jump. We ordered four SQ-7s, one for each stage along with a spare. I could’ve spent more if I wanted to, but I prefer this price range, and we wound up getting a feature set that leans much more toward what you’d find on a high-end, larger-format desk.”
After spending a few weeks training, programming, and creating show files, the team officially hit the street with the new SQ-7s late last year. “My operators are all highly-skilled, many of them being former touring engineers,” Pizzo notes. “While the software layout on the SQ-7s was completely different from what we were used to, and we essentially had to start from scratch to build our show files for the 12-14 bands that regularly play the street, the transition was surprisingly quick. Once everyone mixed a couple of shows we were locked and loaded and just rolling along. Out here, you can get a lot of shows under your belt very quickly.”
A 48-channel, 36-bus digital mixer, the SQ-7 provides Pizzo and his FSE team with 33 faders, a considerable move up from where they had previously been. Based around the A&H 96 kHz XCVI engine, the board is outfitted with 32 onboard mic preamps, eight stereo FX engines with dedicated stereo return channels, plus access to A&H’s RackExtra FX library.
Pizzo purchased the desks equipped with dedicated plugins, including a tube stage preamp as well as A&H SQ-7 compressor pack 1 and GEQ pack bundles. Adding a Waves card to all four expanded the palette of effects at each operator’s disposal to a point where now Pizzo comfortably says, “There’s not a need for any outboard gear anywhere at this time.”
That’s an especially good thing, as real estate is in short supply at each location, a fact that forces the house mix to be done from the side of the stage instead of out front, and each individual SQ-7 to be used for both the house and monitors. As an aid to making better sense of these realities, the SQ MixPad app, which provides wireless control of all main mixing functions via a tablet, lets the team physically move into the house, put their mix together, and then return to the console, where they listen to a cue wedge during the actual show.