Hi all,
I’m thinking of getting hold of a line mixer, to free up some more inputs on my sound-card.
Something which is mostly stereo, transparent, rack-mountable and ideally with an effects send is ideal.
One of the ART units maybe? Any recommendations?
Thanks!
If second hand is okay you could keep an eye out for some of the old Tascam/Fostex rack mixers of the late 80s. Yamaha made a few too. They were sold as keyboard sub mixers but bear in mind most will be unbalanced ins/outs
I was using an Alesis one until recently, a multimix 12r I think it was called? I’ve loaned it to a pal but that did the job okay, picked it up for around £50 on eBay a few years ago. Think it was 8 mono and 4 stereo inputs. Mine was the earlier blue one, later ones are black. Behringer do a couple of rack mixers too.
I recently started using a Behringer RX1602 as a cheap way of getting some more ins. The 16 inputs can be used kind of indepenedantly, but really its designed to be used as 8 stereo pairs. Each pair has an FX send.
How are you finding it, quality wise? Does it sound okay or do you cave to be careful with levels etc? I’m interested as I decent rack mixer is always a handy bit of kit in my experience.
Samson SM10 is quite good, I currently use one. Others I have used in the past are Rane SM82, Speck X-Sum, and Tascam MM200/100 although those are older/noisier.
but only one mono send or am I wrong?
The RX1602 sounds good to me. I have not done any special testing to determine noise floor or anything like that, and I’m using it to gather outputs from a bunch of unbalanced devices. I then connect it to two ins on my mackie 1604. Each channel pair has a -10db “operating level” switch, so getting levels right is made easier.
That is true. The monitor out is TRS mono. However, the phones out is TRS stereo, and there is a switch to send the monitor bus to the phones out. I have not done any testing to confirm whether monitor bus into the phones out is actually real stereo though…
ART MX822 has stereo fx send and stereo return.