Most popular brands for MINI MIXERS

J

javierf55

New member
Hi, I'm starting to experiment with Audacity and Acid Xpress but then two things comes to the shopping list.

1. A sound card which I'm about to decide for the Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro USB Audio System with THX SB1095.

2. Here it comes thousands of options for a mini mixer like Behringer, Alesis, Nady, etc

My question is which are the more popular yet good quality brands for this mini mixers? my option as of now is the Alesis IO4 but I'm not sure if I have covered all the possibilities. :confused:

Thanks a lot in advance.
 
1. Creative/Soundblaster are fine for gaming or watching DVDs but they're hopeless for recording. The inputs are noisy and tend to be locked to 48kHz sampling then do a conversion if you want anything else. For the same money there are tons of specialist cards that will do a far better job.

2. What do you want to use the mixer for? You can do a lot of home recording with no mixer at all (though I'm a fan of having one for ease of level adjustment and for setting up monitor mixes). What features you need will determine which is best for you. Behringer and Alesis are okay for the money but definitely at the low end of the market. I'd avoid Nady like the plague--and if you can squeeze a few dollars more into the budget, Soundcraft make some nice little units which I've put into a few broadcast chains and had good results.

Bob
 
Thanks for your advise Bob. I will just use the mixer to plug a couple of guitars and a microphone. No more. So the one I was looking is the Alesis IO4 or the Multimix 6 USB.

I like your comment about the sound card; the thing here is that my PC is a standard one with common sound card.

Thanks.
 
javierf55 said:
my PC is a standard one with common sound card.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

They all are,

The point is, that creative soundblaster products are no better than standard built in soundcards when it comes to 'pro' recording.


Those two devices that you listed are usb interfaces, so just ignore your built in sound card and there's no problem :)
 
If you get one of those mixers a lot of them have their own built ind sound interface that bypass your sound card - so skip the sound card and get a direct USB or Firewire mixer - you will get better sound

Like Steenamaroo just said :)
 
Finally I decided to buy the Behringer 502 and I'm very happy with it. It does what I expected to do at a very reasonable price. Now I have my guitar connected to the tonelab st, connected to the mixer as well as the tascam DR-03, the mobile (which I use to play while I record on the Tascam), the computer with Audacity and then the output of the mixer to the line 6 amp.

Therefore, I'm a happy newbie...
 
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