The QSC TouchMix compact digital mixer was unveiled with much fan-fair at the Winter NAMM Show in 2014. We found it remarkable enough to name it one of the Top 5 Products for Churches from Winter NAMM 2014. It's taken us a while to get our hands on a review unit, but it finally happened.
QSC currently offers in two flavors, the TouchMix-8 and TouchMix-16. Very similar in appearance, what immediately strikes you about each one is the touchscreen which takes the place of traditional faders. A look at the spec sheet tells you there's much more going on. QSC sent us the TouchMix-16 which retails for $1,629.99. The smaller TouchMix-8 lists for $1,129.99. The TouchMix-16 has 16 mic inputs, four of which are combo jacks. There are also two stereo inputs on TRS (tip-ring-sleeve) jacks that bring the total input count to 20. There are technically 10 aux mixes on it; I say technically because one through six are mono, and 7/8 and 9/10 are stereo. The mono mixes leave the desk on XLRs while the stereo auxes have TRS jacks, which would make it hard to break them up. So, you really have the capability to do eight monitor mixes, which is impressive for a mixer this size.
On most small mixers, you end up burning auxes to do effects, but not on the TouchMix. There are four dedicated effects busses that feed a selection of reverb, delay, chorus and pitch change effects. There is also a pitch-corrector processor that can be assigned to any channel. There are also eight DCAs and eight mute groups, which might be overkill on a 20-channel mixer. Once again, that's an impressive set of features for a mixer of this size.
INSIDE LOOK
Internally, the mixer uses 32-bit floating point processing and has 24-bit AD and DA converters. It also features Class-A microphone amps which sound quite good. Each input has a four-band, fully parametric EQ, variable high and low cut filters, a gate, and compressor with a de-esser. The aux outputs also have a four-band parametric, limiter, delay and four notch filters for eliminating feedback in wedges. The main output substitutes a 31-band graphic EQ for the parametric.
Other goodies include a dedicated talk-back mic input, separate phones and monitor outputs (on TRS jacks), and four user-assignable buttons for quick access to common tasks. As is becoming common on small digital mixers, the TouchMix features over 100 presets for various types of inputs you’d find in a live setting. I didn’t try them all, but the ones I did were good starting points. I suspect experienced sound guys would ignore them or modify the starting points, but they may be helpful for less experienced operators. There are also wizards that assist in gain set up and effects selection and routing.
The mixer is laid out well and acts the way you’d expect it to. Even novice users should have no trouble getting up and running quickly.
ATTRIBUTES & FUNCTIONS
Physically, the mixer is quite small at roughly 13x10x2 inches. It uses an external power supply and a beefy power cord. It gets quite warm in operation, which tells me there is a lot going on under the hood. The interface is dominated by the 6x3.5-inch color touch screen. Instead of physical faders, the screen presents banks of eight virtual faders at a time. You can touch and drag the faders on the screen, or touch the channel then use the large knob to raise or lower the level.
A series of buttons allow the user to access the mixer’s deep feature set quickly. Below the phantom power and mixer power buttons are five easy-to-activate rectangle buttons labeled Wizard, Info, FX Mute, FX Master and Mute Groups. The Wizard button helps inexperienced users set gain and route channels to effects. Info is basically a help menu, which is very useful. FX Mute is a nice touch, as it kills all the effects in a single button press that is always on the surface. FX Master takes you right to the FX Master page—shocking, I know. Mute groups brings up a set of on-screen buttons for the eight mute groups.
Below those buttons are the Phones, Talk and Monitor buttons. Phones and Monitor bring up an on-screen volume indication for those two outputs. Talk does exactly what you would expect it to. That’s a common theme on this mixer; it’s laid out well and acts the way you’d expect it to. Even novice users should have no trouble getting up and running quickly.
The big knob on the lower right side of the mixer has a cool blue ring around it and there are five buttons surrounding the top half. Four are user-definable and come pre-programmed for left-right navigation, cue clear and clear clip. The final button is the channel polarity flip control. Next to the touch screen are three more buttons; Home, Menu and Record/Play. Home takes you back to the main channel display quickly, so if you get lost. Menu brings up the system menu, which has a bunch of controls for how the mixer behaves, sets security, gives access to aux and effects overviews and more. Record/Play brings the transport controls to the bottom of the screen.
In use, the TouchMix is fairly easy to get around on, with one caveat that I’ll get to in a minute. Routing is simple and intuitive, the display is clear and bright and I never struggled to figure out how to do something. It offers two USB ports on the back, one of which comes with a Wi-Fi adapter installed. The other can be used for any FAT-32 formatted drive and can record 22 channels; all 20 inputs plus stereo mix. You can even play them back by setting each channel to take signal from the track rather than the input. It makes for easy virtual soundcheck.
While the mixer sounds quite good, I found the touch screen a bit laggy, and sometimes the fader would over-shoot my target level. The new version 2.1 firmware which was released during our evaluation did help, but I was still wary. Thankfully there are two other ways to control what’s going on on the touchscreen. First, I found the knob to be much more accurate than the touchscreen faders, but be aware there are ballistics built in; if you spin it fast, the fader moves fast. A quick flick of the knob can take a channel from off to +10 in under a half-second, so be careful. Moving it slowly it is easily controllable. Even better is a fine control mode that engages when you push it down.
iPAD PERKS
The best way to use this mixer in my opinion is with an iPad. The iPad app is really quite good. All functions are available on the app, except one, including all set up and configuration settings. So after gain is set on each channel, I’d walk away and use the iPad exclusively. What’s missing on the app? Head amp controls. They are analog controls that sit in two rows below the two rows of mic inputs. They are not hard to use, but making them recallable would have been nice. If the head amps were digitally controlled; I’d never use the surface for anything. It also helps that the iPad is multi-touch; the TouchMix screen is not.
An iPhone app is also available, but it’s really designed for monitor mixing. You can allow a device to access all mixes (including the main) or just one through the configuration screen, making it easy for band members to mix their own ears. It did crash twice during testing, but to be fair this was about the time of the firmware update, and upon reboot it worked just fine.
When paired with an iPad, I would recommend the TouchMix-16 for small churches, portable churches, student rooms, ancillary rooms etc. It sounds excellent, has a long list of remarkable features and the number of aux mixes is surprising for a mixer in this size and price class.
