Allen & Heath Qu-24 Mixes Anderson Cooper Recording at NASPA

This year's "Student Affairs Administrators in High Education" (NASPA) Conference in San Antonio, Texas featured award winning journalist Anderson Cooper as its opening session keynote speaker. Sound engineer Josh Johnson mixed the opening session audio for streaming broadcast and program recordings using an Allen & Heath Qu-24 digital mixer.

NASPA conference attendees included 6,000 student administrators from all over the country discussing education reform and other topics, and was broadcast to 500,000 students at remote locations. VER Rentals mixed the live event, FOH sound and Johnson's mixer was provided PSAV.

Johnson received a 24-channel split from the FOH system including multiple handheld and lavalier microphones along with recorded and computer sources, from the FOH system. He created three paired mixes (main and redundant) for broadcast, recordings, and video Q/A using the Qu-24's matrix and aux outputs. Johnson used the Qu-24's channel compression on vocals and its EQ where needed and he fed a stereo, post-fader mix to the backstage shout system.

As an experienced FOH, A/V and studio engineer, Johnson has mixed for Live Nation and other tours and was familiar with the Qu-24 from his work at a club in Austin. He says, "At the NASPA session, I had multiple handheld and lavalier mics to route quickly but I find the Qu-24's matrix, and bus routing very quick and easy to navigate for applications like this."