Common Allen and Heath Mistakes to Avoid

I've fixed more soundchecks than I can count where the desk wasn't the problem — how it was bought, set up or run on the night was. If you're working with Allen & Heath gear, or thinking about it, these are the mistakes I see most often, and every one of them is easy to avoid once you know to look for it.

Mistake 1: Buying More Desk Than the Gig Needs

A flagship Allen & Heath platform is wasted on a duo playing pub gigs. Work out your realistic channel and bus count first, then buy into the tier that covers it with a bit of headroom — not the one with the most impressive spec sheet. Paying for 64 channels you'll never fill is money that could have gone toward speakers, monitors or a spare cable kit.

Mistake 2: Underestimating Bus Count

People obsess over channel count and forget buses — the separate mixes you send to monitors, effects and recording feeds. Running out of buses mid-tour is a genuinely common and entirely avoidable problem. Count your monitor mixes and effects sends before you buy, not after you're already short.

Mistake 3: Skipping Gain Structure

Setting every fader high and every gain low (or the other way round) is one of the fastest routes to a noisy, harsh mix. Set gain first, on every channel, before you touch a single fader. It's not glamorous, but it's the single biggest factor in whether a mix sounds clean or messy.

Mistake 4: Ignoring Firmware Updates

Digital desks, including the current Allen & Heath range, get genuine feature and stability improvements through firmware — the Avantis V2.0 update, for example, meaningfully increases channel and bus capacity on compatible systems. Skipping updates for months means missing fixes and features you're already paying for.

Mistake 5: Never Learning Scene Recall Properly

Scene recall is one of digital mixing's biggest advantages, and plenty of engineers barely use it because they never sat down and learned it properly before a real show. Practise saving and recalling scenes on a rehearsal, not for the first time in front of a room full of people. It's one of the features that genuinely separates a digital Allen & Heath desk from an analogue one, so it's worth the time to learn.

Mistake 6: Choosing Networking as an Afterthought

Deciding you need Dante-based remote I/O after you've already bought a desk without it is an expensive mistake to fix. If there's any chance you'll want to run stage boxes over a network cable rather than a multicore, check networking support before you buy, not once you're already stuck.

Mistake 7: Trusting Manufacturer Figures as Gospel

Quoted latency figures — SQ's roughly 0.7 milliseconds, for instance — are genuine platform specifications, but your real-world result depends on your whole signal chain: outboard gear, in-ear systems, wireless links. Treat the number as a strong indicator, not a guarantee for your exact setup.

Mistake 8: Not Testing Before the Gig That Matters

Taking a new desk straight to an important show without a proper test run is asking for trouble. Run it at a rehearsal or a low-stakes gig first, work out where everything lives, and iron out any surprises somewhere the stakes are low.

Getting It Right

Avoid these and working with an Allen & Heath desk stops being a source of stress and starts being genuinely straightforward. If you want to get the buying decision right from the start, our buyer's guide and best value picks both cover matching channel count, bus count and budget properly.

Frequently Asked Questions