Allen and Heath SQ-5 Review: What the Extra Money Buys

Three things. It runs its core at 96 kHz with latency under a millisecond, which matters most to musicians on in-ear monitors who can hear a slow console as a smear on their own voice. It includes automatic microphone mixing, which continuously manages the gain of open microphones so a panel, a drama or a five-reader rota does not build up room noise and feedback across every open channel. And its preamp stage is genuinely quieter at high gain, which is the difference on hanging choir microphones.

The 48 input channels and 36 buses are the headline, but the buses matter more than the channels in a church: they are what feed wedges, in-ears, an overflow room, a stream mix and a lobby feed at the same time. See the digital mixer roundup for where it sits in the field.

Note the gap between input channels and onboard preamps. It is the single most misread line on this sheet.

The SQ-5 mixes 48 channels but only sixteen of them have a preamp on the console itself. Every input beyond sixteen has to arrive over dSNAKE or SLink from a stage box, and that stage box is a separate purchase that can add well over a thousand dollars to a budget that a committee already approved at $3,999. Churches have signed the purchase order for this console and then discovered they could not plug in the drum kit.

The sibling that solves it is the SQ-6, with 24 onboard preamps and 25 faders. If your input list is above sixteen and you have no stage box in the plan, read SQ-5 versus SQ-6 before you buy, and price the whole system rather than the console.

Published owner reviews converge on preamp quality and on the feel of the surface: the faders, the encoders and the screen are described as being from a different class than consoles in the two thousand dollar bracket. Latency draws consistent praise from owners running in-ear monitoring, which is the application where it is audible at all.

The consistent criticisms are the depth of the menu structure, which owners describe as requiring real study rather than exploration, and the price of the ecosystem: stage boxes, expansion cards and the second console for the other campus all cost what the brand costs. Nobody in the owner consensus complains about how it sounds.

Budget pick, because most churches cannot hear the difference: the X32 at $1,999.00 gives 32 preamps on the surface and a workflow every visiting engineer knows. On a close-miked band in a 400 seat room, the gap is far smaller than the price gap.

Step-up alternative, because sixteen preamps is the constraint: the SQ-6 adds eight more preamps and eight more faders for about a thousand dollars, which is cheaper than the console plus a stage box.

Different tool, because your bottleneck may be stereo channels: the WING counts every channel as stereo, so a stereo keyboard and playback tracks stop eating two channels each.

Buy it if you have a room of 500 seats or more, an operator who will spend time in the manual, in-ear monitoring on the platform, and a service format with many open microphones that automatic mixing will improve. Buy it if you are setting a standard across campuses and want every room to behave identically.

Do not buy it if your rota is four volunteers who each mix once a month, because the console will be run as a smaller console with a larger price tag. Size the room first with the sanctuary coverage calculator and the input list with the channel calculator, then decide.