Recording - February 2018 - 48

QSC

TouchMix-30
Pro Digital
Mixer
From live venue to studio-
with one little cable
REVIEW BY MIKE METLAY

hile most recording musicians think of QSC as a
maker of (really good) PA speaker systems, the
company has been garnering an ever-growing
fan base for its TouchMix series of portable digital mixing
consoles. These compact and affordable digital mixers take
their name from the large color multitouch display that provides
the user with nearly all of the mixer's control functions and
visual feedback. The original TouchMix-8 and TouchMix-16
have now been joined by the TouchMix-30 Pro, which is just
as much at home in the studio as in live applications.
I had a chance to work with the TouchMix-30 Pro for a
while, wiring it into my home studio in place of my usual
mixer, and found that there is a lot to like in this powerful
digital mixing and recording solution.

Why use a live mixer in the studio?

Many engineers double up on studio and live work, and if
you don't mind doing a bit of patching and unpatching (you
were careful to label all of your cables before you unplugged
them, right?), a digital mixer that you've learned to use
effectively in the studio can be quickly taken out in the field.
Learning just one mixer's workflow gives you a firm grasp on
everything you'll need to know when recording a band, be it
in your tracking room or on stage.
Besides, in recent years, live sound has been where a lot of
the coolest new trends in mixer design have been making an
appearance, and many musicians are discovering that what
streamlines and simplifies setup and operation in the heat of a
live performance can be equally welcome in the studio. Just as
one example: wireless remote control of mixer functions over
Wi-Fi, whether for the engineer or the talent, started out as a
timesaver in live setups, but is quite useful in the studio as well.
48

RECORDING February 2018

The TouchMix-30 Pro is one of the most user-friendly live
mixing consoles out there, with a raft of features that make
it easy for the relative newcomer to get started and do well
with mixing. While it has certain features that are unlikely to
be needed in a recording studio (feedback elimination and
main-bus graphic EQ, to name a couple), the vast majority of
its capabilities are useful in both sets of applications... so why
not take advantage of a mixer that's almost literally designed
to teach you how to use it from the get-go?

The basics

For an engineer that expects a lot of faders and knobs and
switches on a mixer, the TouchMix-30 Pro presents a stark,
simple interface. A fairly portable box at roughly 17" square
in footprint and about 7.5" tall at the back, the only analog
controls on the mixer are the gain pots for the first 24 input
channels. The rest of the interface is taken up with the 10"
color capacitive multitouch display, 23 backlit buttons, and
a push-turn encoder surrounded by a bright blue LED ring for
easy visibility in a darkened club. The encoder controls whatever function is highlighted at the moment; pushing in and
turning gives finer control of the same parameter (e.g. 01. dB
level increments vs. 1.0 dB).
Many of the buttons select commonly-used pages on the
display: a Home button with a graphic of several faders gets
you back to the overview of the mixer, and there are buttons
for USB Record/Playback, FX Mute, Talkback, Phones and
Monitor level, and so forth. The rest select display pages that
allow quick access to a particular parameter for all channels
at once, such as 48V phantom power or the built-in Real Time
Analyzer. Eight User buttons are reassignable if desired, but
come preset with useful functions like moving left and right

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - February 2018