As promised

Well, not that anyone cares, but I did say that I was compelled to justify my earlier purchase of a certain mixer, so just skip this post if you ain’t interested.

Choices

My initial purpose was to get a phantom power box for my microphones, but then thought why not just spend extra and get the phantom power as well as mixing capabilities. Then I pushed my luck in justifying getting an affordable mixer that was also a control surface.

For those who don’t know, a mixer in uber-laymans terms is that board which has those knobs and faders – where you can put mics, instruments, etc. and easily control them in one place. I mention this because a control surface is similar in a sense, but was meant to interact with software. There are digital consoles that are both mixers and control surfaces. A perfect example would be Digidesign’s Control24 series.

To cut a long story short, I had to scrap that idea because the cheapest console that’s both a mixer/control surface would probably be M-Audio’s ProjectMix I/O – there’s also the Mackie Control Universal which I have no idea how much is. I was eventually left with the need for a simple analog mixer with phantom power (which is pretty standard).

The Brands

My conditions:

1. 4 or more tracks – I usually just record voice and guitar, so two would do, but the prospect of how useful the mixer on a live scenario would be, I felt it would be safe to up the tracks a bit to accomodate future “upgrades.”
2. Faders – almost all mixers with less than 6-8 tracks are all knob-based. Having a fader is very useful
3. Small – something that can fit in a bag in case you have to bring it somewhere
4. Phantom power – some don’t have this so it would be prudent to make sure.
5. Per-track mute buttons – you’d be surprised, when you start going down to 6 tracks or less, a lot of mixers lose these useful buttons.
6. Fit my budget – obviously

I only considered 3 brands. Mackie, Behringer, and M-Audio.Basically because these were probably the only brands that had consumer lines that were somewhat affordable ¹ Other brands usually have mixers with too many tracks that what I need for the moment – and understandably their prices are quite hefty as they usually start with 16-24 tracks already.. The last two were interesting because they make very affordable gear. M-Audio would’ve been nice if actually had a diversified multi-track line. Unfortunately they focus too much on digital I/Os or audio interfaces in general. Your choice of actual mixers are extremely limited. Plus the fact that once you do find one (e.g. ProjectMix), it’s not that affordable anymore.

In any case, actually narrowing down to what models I could choose from was the easy part, because that checklist I have above apparently narrowed the results to like 1 or 2 mixers per brand.

I really wanted a Mackie (don’t we all?). And mackie actually had one interesting product as far as the specs I needed was concerned – their Onyx 1220, which cost 600USD – so my heart sank immediately. The only Mackie mixer that was in my budget was the DFX.6, which wasn’t worth the cash.

So I was pretty much left with Behringer’s Xenyx series, which had a myriad of different mixer models. And the closest model they had to the Mackie Onyx was probably the 1204FX which cost less than 200 dollars. Since I had no way from sourcing it from the US, I just bit the bullet and accepted Philippine retail prices. Luckily they had a non-FX model ² While I do believe in hardware effects, having effects built in a mixer to me, is synonimous to using built-in video/audio of a motherboard in a PC – which can be decent, but why waste money on them if you can get a separate, BETTER effects processor down the road. (1204, which I have) which was even cheaper – and allowed me to acquire for less than Php10k

Marketing crap

As much as I hate to admit it, the marketing actually worked for me. Their whole “British-EQ” pitch simply meant that they have emulated the kind of EQ process pioneered by Mr. Rupert Neve ³ Who incidentally had also designed a bunch of Taylor’s successful amplification systems. and has been some kind of phenomenon as far as “EQ preference” is concerned. Another was because its predecessor, the Eurodesk series, seems to have had excellent reviews – and obbviously they touted the the Xenyx as a improved version. The XLR connectors have been improved from the Eurodesk series as well, they now use premium Nutrik connectors.

And there’s the fact that it came with a digital interface adaptor. So basically you can plug it to your computer via USB and be sure you’re getting a clean, digital signal. Ironically, I’m not using it because for some reason I can’t use it in ASIO mode when using my Terratec as well. And I’m sure as hell not going to go WDM mode. So I’d rather deal with an analog signal, my hardware sounds clean anyways hehehe.

But I could’ve easily taken these things with the grain of salt, ultimately I knew I was just rationalizing not getting that Mackie I couldn’t afford. But it took the sales rep of Behringer to convince me. I always tend to listen to someone if they have the guts to slam their own products. And that’s exactly what he did when I was inquiring about other products which I had no intention to buy in the first place.

First was his warning me of getting the B-Control control surface, because there were a lot of cases where it would hang and corrupt computers. Or the simple stuff like saying, you don’t need a hum-reducer (as I was intrigued at this little aluminum box) as long as you have properly grounded equipment, and getting such a gadget was ultimately a waste of money. This is stuff I already knew, but was extremely pleased to hear it from someone else nontheless – which made it obvious that he wasn’t merely a sales rep, but someone who actually cared about audio.

Then we also spent a whole amount of time (about 2 hours) just trying different combinations of connectors and mixers in the showroom, which was a big plus. In any case, the Xenyx, with all of it’s feautres and digital I/O module give it a really good value for the money. So my ultimate decision of getting the Xenyx was a sound one… and one that I would never regret.

Unless, that Mackie Onyx suddenly drops to the same price range hehehehe.