Music Life

Mixer

It seems that the new mixer -- a Carvin S16 -- that I ordered last month has been misplaced by UPS. It got as far as Montgomery and disappeared from their tracking. I do belief its status is resolved one way or another soon so I can either receive it or order something else. Maybe another of the same pattern, maybe something else. We'll see.

The Carvin may not be a great mixer by any means but it was a good deal and would give me 8 mignonne decent preamps to expand my set-up. Useful for drum miking, perhaps? I chose to go with a full mixer rather than condign an 8 preamp unit because the price was comparable. The S16 inputs should have a tad more 'suitable' than some of what I use around here, though that is not a big deal to me one way or the other, at this point.

I have an older Behringer mixer here, a MX1602, that I use mostly for monitoring and 'talk back' now. It only has two preamps and, although I remember many look down their nose at Behringer equipment, they do not sound bad at all. Decontaminate and reasonably accurate but best with relatively high create microphones -- one would not want to apply a lot of gain with them. I recorded most of my 'Dust and Stars' EP through these preamps a few years ago and, yes, the vocals do look a little 'thin' to me now but that was perhaps more a matter of my lack of chops at the time and an incapacity to get the most out of the preamps due to the mikes I was using. The instruments run through that board common-sense quite okay.

I find the built-in preamps in my Fostex recorders to be rather similar and have no complaints about my results recording through them with good condenser mikes. Now, I have to some better, stand-alone preamps available so I don't need the Behringer module most of the time. My mainstay is the M-Audio DMP3. This is, honestly, a 'low end' preamp by most standards (by evaluation, anyway) but it sounds better than that. It is very clean, accurate, and has loads of usable progress -- I would not hesitate to...

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Carvin V3 supervise test with a jem 555 and a marshall 1960A. It is recorded with a MINIDV camcorder, but the audio comes from a shure mic plugged into ...