I have various setups that i want to have going through my monitiors and im sick of pulling xlrs and rcas out or my Zero 4 and plugging others in.
12, 16, 18 channel Mixer in the sub £350 /$550 price range.
Needs 3 or 4 stereo channels and preferably USB but not essential.
Ive been looking at:
Mackie Pro FX range (not yet in UK)
Behringer Xenyx range (heavily featured, cheap, good enough?)
Allen & Heath Zed range (why all the Aux ins/outs, 4 per channel?)
Soundcraft (good quality but bloody ugly)
Any others, any that you guys use.
Please stick to the price range as im moving house at the moment so i need to buy curtains and cushions and all the other shit that girlfriends make you buy… apparently a cooker is a necessity… who knew?
I have a Behringer with built in FX and I’ve used for studio and live applications and I love it. One of my friends made fun of it when I told him what I had (makes me sound like i’m 16), but it’s held up for 2 years now and I’ve been pretty rough on it. All metal case, phantom power, great mic pre’s…it’s a good board.
What are you planning to use the mixer for exactly? Are you going to be recording multiple musicians live? A few more details would go a long way toward suggesting what kind of mixer to get.
Behringers have a bad reputation for their build and sound quality. However, I cannot confirm that. I really dig the bang for the buck, never had a quality problem even after spilling a huge cup of coffee into one of them, a MX 2004a. The mic preamps are relatively noisy though. So if you don’t need mic preamps, go for a behringer. If you do, the Mackies are probably the better choice.
Can’t say anything about The Allen&Heath and Soundcraft ones, never owned something from them. Aren’t they in an entirely different price range?
Ok yeah, what im intending to do is hook up:
Korg Zero 4 DVS (TSP) in one stereo channel 1 (laptop 1)
My controller setup VCI100/Kontrol S4 into another stereo channel 2 (laptop 2)
Maschine to the USB input on another stereo channel 3 (laptop 3)
Guitar Rig in stereo channel 4 (if theres 4)(laptop 4)
PC music library via USB channel.
CD player maybe on 2 mono channels.
All coming out of my KRK monitors.
Wont be recording anything just yet (or at all?) Certainly not musicians. I played in bands for 15 years i aint doing that again for a while…
This is purely for home use.
Jimbob, interesting to hear about the Behringer. I had the same reservations but a guy at NI has recomended them as well.
These are some of the current options but im totally open to your opinions.
Found an old review on the bigger brother of the Xenyx x1222 on Soundonsound:
I’ve heard some good things about the allen&heath mixer, and to be honest, I’d prefer it just because the layout is less crowded. Plus I never used built-in FX on a PA mixer, especially in that price range they just don’t cut it.
Do you need a subgroup? If you do, the A&H is not an option.
If it was my choice, I’d probably check my wallet and see if I have the money for the A&H, and if not, go for the Behringer 1222. But don’t take my word for it
I’m going to say A&H for the same uncluttered reason. You don’t really need some of the features the others might offer and you know the A&H sound quality will be up to par which I think should be your biggest concern.
I’d avoid Behringer for the sound quality issues but like others here my evidence is all hearsay – no question they are a great deal financially for what you get.
In a similar price range take a look at Alesis – we’ve got a iMultiMix 8 USB at work and it works great for what we use it for. Sound quality is a lot better than what I expected for the price, and it doubles as an audio interface with the USB connection. Coolest feature it has is an ipod dock, you can play music off the ipod when you don’t want to fiddle with your computers (4 laptops?!), but better yet, it supports recording TO the ipod right on the mixer so you can record whatever you’re doing without re-routing cables to a (fifth?) laptop. The interface on the 8 is pretty basic and it’s all knobs, no sliders, so if that makes a difference you might want to take note of it. The 16 channel version has sliders though, obviously it costs a bit more too. We got the 8 for under $200; I think the 16 goes for about twice that.
If firewire is an option for you, you should look into the Mackie Onyx line. They’re about $400 for the 8 channel and 500 for the 12, and they also double as computer audio interface but they work via firewire. They have a 16 channel too but it’s like $1500.
One thing you might want to consider is outputs as well. Do you want more than one output? I like having the option of sending my output to speakers in the living room that are connected to my home stereo once in a while – if that’s something you might want to do, make sure there’s more than one output. I actually use a Mackie “Big Knob” for this purpose but it probably doesn’t have enough inputs for you – http://www.mackie.com/products/bigknob/ – if that would work though it’s a far simpler solution than a big mixer with dozens of little knobs. But if you actually want to mix together different inputs and not just switch between them, yeah you want a studio mixer…
Awesome, cheers guys. Will digest properly when I get home.
I hear ya about the behringers, they do seem to offer a lot for little money and I don’t need the fx .
I do want to send outputs to other speakers about the house so I guess thats were th sub-groups come in ?
personally i use a patch bay to solve this problem,
if the mixer has usb it wont play nice with the korg so it’ll have to be plugged into another computer to use the usb input and output, these always seem to be 2in 2out. as usb doesnt have the bandwidth to do multiple i/o’s, personally i’d avoid a usb equiped model
and plumb for a mixer if thats your need, as in you want to be able to mix what comes out of your laptop and another source but dont have a spare input on the korg z4.
a mixer will add extra complexity to your routing and its very easy to end up with silence because a channel isnt routed to a bus or an insert cable is connected to an fx unit thats powered down, for this reason i went for a patch bay, makes re-routing whats connected to my monitors a breeze but avoids the routing matrix issues that come with a mixer.
As for the behringer debate, most gear is made in china these days, most companies sub a job lot out to the lowest bidder, behringer are the exception, they own a factory in china and because of this have end to end control of the manufacturing process.
and unless you are spending more than $1000 the equipement will be cobbled together using ic’s, and all the audio manufacturers pick their ic’s from the same basket.
personally i own 6 pieces of behringer kit, they’re all more than 3 years old and they all still work as new. I’m eyeing up their cross-over for my pa rig too.
If they were as bad as people make out then they would be gone, cheap is grand, but if the kits shite then you still wont sell any
Yeah, some people take the Behringer bashing a lot too far.
The point is: some of their stuff is good, some isn’t. But I guess it’s the same with most manufacturers. And back in the days when Behringer were kinda new, they had a lot of stuff that sucked, and that’s where they still have their bad reputation from.
I had the MX2004A, and it was great, as long as you used better outboard mic preamps. I also really dig my DDM4000. I’ve seen a lot of Behringer gear in the rigs of semi-pro rock or pop bands, mostly compressors, tuners, effect processors and the like. Stuff that you need to do the job quickly, reliably and good enough.
In the end one should get the right tool for the job. If all I wanted was to add a number of sound sources just for home or small studio monitoring, I’d probably go for the cheapest stuff my eyes could bare, cause any mixer that’s been built in the past decades should be able to handle line inputs well enough. In the low price range, Behringers are probably the better mixers, just for the fact that they’ve learned the hard way that building crap and selling it cheaply does not pay off.
Still, if I had to choose between the four examples that Karlos gave, I’d go for the Allen&Heath, but only for one reason: It has less stuff I wouldn’t need and for that reason the interface is less cluttered. I like clean user interfaces better, that’s just a personal preference.
Yeah thats the issue with Behringer. Mixed reviews. Some really good some really bad.
The A&H Zed series is looking good but i just dont need all those Auxiliaries.
The USB input would be for Maschine only, from a laptop. I thought this could be a way of freeing up a soundcard (although i have enough).
The korg is firewire and is my DVS setup so it would just be an audio stereo channel on the studio mixer.
Lol i dont think ill be doing it all at one time… i can barely do one thing at a time.
Im just sick of unhooking/hooking stuff to the Zero4.
Figured a studio mixer with everything running into it and outputting from my monitors would be a good way to go.
