QSC release two new Q-SYS Cores, Win The Internet

If you’re going to hire someone to host presentations and represent your company, you could do worse than hiring a team that forged their relationship doing improv and comedy while at University. QSC’s Pat and Nat (Senior Director of Marketing Patrick Heyn and Senior Training Manager Nathan Makaryk) are the international rock stars of AV tradeshow presentations, and are also pretty fine comedians. Today at 10 AM AEST they fronted a live webinar for the release of QSC’s Q-SYS two new cores, the Flex 8 and Nano. Slickly produced, engagingly presented, and clocking in at a waffle-free 37 minutes, it was the best online event I’ve attended during the pandemic. They actually made me forget that I hate online events.

It’s testament to QSC’s relentless pursuit of innovation that they have the insight to make a guy with a BA in Drama, Theatre Arts and Stagecraft (Nat) and another with a Bachelor’s in American History (Pat) the voice of their company. Both attained their degrees at University of California, Irvine, which is where they started doing comedy together. 20 years later, they now head up the world’s best AV training programme, with wit, humour, and style. Brands take note – when you’re presenting to an audience who have a lot of exposure to stagecraft, you need to bring your A-Game.

Before getting to the new gear, I have to congratulate Nat for dropping the two best lines of the presentation; “Just like all of us for the last six months, the Core Nano has no physical connections.” And in reference to their appearances in vast amounts of online training video; “We’ve been told in YouTube comments that we look like goblins, but worse.” This was not your average tech presentation, and was all the more enjoyable for it.

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And oh yeah, they announced two pretty big new products:

Q-SYS Core 8 Flex and Q-SYS Core Nano

Driven by the proliferation of networked endpoints and the expanding processing needs of a wider variety of spaces and topologies, the Core 8 Flex includes onboard analog audio I/O and GPIO plus network I/O while the Q-SYS Core Nano offers network-only audio I/O processing and control. Built on the same flexible and scalable software foundation as the rest of the Q-SYS processor portfolio, including the best-in-class Q-SYS Core 110f, these new Cores expand design options to meet a wider variety of installations.

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The Q-SYS Core 8 Flex includes a 64 x 64 networked I/O channel capacity with eight onboard FLEX audio channels and eight GPIOs to quickly and easily integrate analog audio and control devices into the Q-SYS Ecosystem. Q-SYS Core Nano offers the same 64 x 64 networked audio I/O without the onboard analog I/O to support installations with smaller spaces with centralised processing and fully networked endpoints. Both of these new Q-SYS Core processors occupy a smaller half-width, 1RU footprint and include pre-installed 8 x 8 Software-based Dante audio channels (license upgradeable up to 32 x 32 channels), driverless USB audio, and AV bridging capabilities.

These smaller Core processors utilise the same, robust software-based architecture, control engine and design software suite (Q-SYS Designer Software) as the rest of the Q-SYS Core processing portfolio. They both offer powerful and scalable DSP processing, video routing and bridging for web conferencing, as well as third-party endpoint integration without the need for separate dedicated control processors.