An industry standard for soundboards is the Quantum 338. It is used most often for churches, concerts, and plays.
This is the soundboard I use when running tech for Journey Church. Out of all the boards I have ever used this one is the most expensive, largest, and easiest to use. It is also my favorite board and the prettiest. If you can’t tell already, I love using this board. Although when you buy the industry standard you pay for it, this board costs about $120,000 depending on the package for just the board! Including the other parts needed to make this function, it approaches over $150,000!
It has 38 faders spread across 3 banks. Each bank also acts as a layer, and each has 4 layers. In total including all the layers this board has 152 faders. Each one is customizable with a label at the top of each fader and each layer is labeled. The Quantum 338 has 128 input channels and 24 built-in effects, with an almost infinite number of effects with external cards and programs. Another feature of this board that I love is that it has 3, 17” LCD screens at the top of each fader bank. These are awesome as they show you all the necessary information at a quick glance and all the extra information you could need with a longer glance or one button. The middle screen acts as the ‘master’ screen this means that if you want to change a setting, patch something, EQ, or any other manner of things you do it on this screen. The left and right screens control audio and fader settings. These are set up with vertical information set up in the order that it applies to the sound. This is very helpful for tuning sound and diagnosing problems.
This board is the largest board I have ever used as stated above. We have it set on a desk, and it talks up the whole desk. This is a plus and a minus because you get more faders and computing power, but it is big, it is a little over 5 feet wide. This makes it a hard thing to just put into any space as it needs its own dedicated area and is not portable by any means. This is something that the SQ-7 and GLD-80 have over the Quantum 388. The portability of those consoles is awesome, but that is probably the only thing that is worse on the Quantum 338. This console is very intuitive to use and makes a ton of sense once you get used to the location of the menus. After the initial learning curve, I would consider this console to be the easiest to use and best console I have ever experienced.
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