Intro to Mixers pt.2 - AudioTech

Hi Gospel Guitarist here. Continuing on with the intro to mixers. This is part two of the series. I didn't plan on a part two until I started looking at this mixer I have and noticing some things I haven't brought out yet. So using this mixer here I'm going to talk about some differences in the channels that you will find on your mixer selections and give you a little bit of tips about shopping for a mixer. First we're going to zoom in here on this section. Now one of the differences you're going to find in mixers is that they offer different types of channels. On this side we have a normal channel with your XLR input and your line input as I discussed in the first video and you have your normal EQ section and then you have your auxiliary, your onboard effects, your pan and your faders and that's pretty typical. Every board is going to have at least that kind of thing on there. Now this board is more designed for multiple types of inputs like for use in your home studio. It's kind of getting blurry now between what you do in a home studio and what you do live because live performances now include all types of DVDs and videos and playback systems especially if you're in ministry work like I am. You never know what you're going to be called upon to deliver for so the more types of inputs you have the better. Now this was my studio board before I advanced over to a Tascam interface and I bought this board because it's number one it supplied firewire so with the firewire system I could actually get each channel to export to the computer system into my digital workstation where in the old days now already for you know maybe five ten years ago USB only offered the stereo bus then it advanced to firewire because of the broadband width that you could send more than one channel to your computer. Today USB has passed the capacity of the firewire and as far as I know and so many boards today that offer USB they are multi-channel exports. It's not just limited to your stereo port anymore. It actually will do all these channels on the newer mixers so this this board here getting back to this area here one of the differences on this board here we have a gain knob up here on the channel on these two channels here seven and eight for example we have a gain knob and then we have high mid and low notice there's no frequency selector here on your mids it's just a straight up shelf mid control and then you have your two auxiliaries your onboard effects auxiliary and your pan and everything else on the channel is the same so the eq is different on these two channels here okay they eliminate the the mid frequency knob okay so here you have parametric mids on these channels you lose your parametric mids okay if we step over to the other these other two channels on 11 and 12 13 and 14 there's yet another difference so here there is no gain control at all it's completely removed so the outboard device that you plug in to this channel would have to be quarter inch inputs versus this channel where you got quarter inch stereo inputs but you also still have the use of an xlr if you want of course that's not stereo so here you would have stereo inputs and hopefully you can control your level on the device that you're plugging in like if it's a dvd player or something you've got a an output control that would set your level going into this channel on this channel you also have settings for plus 4 or negative 10 plus 4 is usually professional gear and commercial gear is usually rated at negative 10 now the eq system on this on these two channels we have a high we have a high mid and a low mid and then you have your lows along with your typical layout here with your auxiliaries nothing down there changes so up here we have yet a third example of how your eq'ing is going to be so we have a high mid and a low mid shelving eq it's a set frequency that those knobs adjust but here we only have one frequency and it's set at 25k says on the board on this one we have two mids so your high q it states is at 3k and your low mid is set at 800k so we have high low mid on these two channels with only quarter inch on these two channels we have only one mid control no sweepable mid and we also have a gain control and we have stereo quarter inch inputs with xlr's on your typical channels over here we have our xlr a single input for your balanced unbalanced and sweepable mids so you can see there's three distinctly different layouts here for your channels even though from the distance all the knobs are laid out the same way but they do different things so what you want to do here is this is where my tip comes in you want to write down what you have if you're using this in your studio or if you're building a studio or if you're building a pa you want to write down everything that you're going to be plugging into this system what kind of outputs do your outboard gear have that's going to determine what you're going to need here for your channel layouts because these boards all look alike and you can get lost in the appearance of them but be looking at every little nuance on these because you just look at the one channel you may be missing what the differences are so just just because the layout on these on this section all looks the same but they do three different things so you want to look closely at your needs and look closely at the boards that you're considering buying just to make sure because the worst thing for me and most engineers is adapters we hate adapters okay adapters are noisy they're cheap they break it's just another problem in the mix you want your cables to be able to just plug right in and you want your board to accommodate what you need it to accommodate without all the use of 100 adapters going in and out of everything just makes more and more problems it just builds on itself so get cables that that you need to plug into the system get the right cables going out of the system's master section so that you can avoid as much of that as possible also on these board this board here has a section for the fire wire for all your assignments on that so just be sure that the board will do what you need it to do whether you're going to run out on firewire or if you need usb make sure it's not only a stereo bus make sure it covers all the channels going on the usb but this is just another example of another board and i hope that helps you out a little bit more and that'll be it for the coverage of mixers at this point and i hope you found the video interesting please click the like button and the share button and stay tuned for another video next week as we keep on advancing in the audio world thanks for watching