is my mixer compresing the signal where an m-audio fast track won't?

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elduderino

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I've recently invested in a m-audio fast track interface and a new mic- my old equipment was plagued by noise(hissing etc). I already had an alesis mixer that connected to my computer via usb. I bought the fast track as the guy in the shop said that my current Alesis mixer would be further compressing the signal that gets recorded in to cubase. I asked why the fast track would be any better, they're bot going in via usb. He said the alesis mixer would be compressing it where the fast track would be going full 24 bit in to the computer. Is this right?
 
Mixers don't compress unless they have a built in compressor and you're using that.

Maybe he simply meant that the Alesis was lower quality and would screw the sound up more than the M-Audio. Is the Alesis 16 or 20-bit? If so then I'd imagine that's what he meant. 24-bit does sound way better to most people.

A good place to start might be to record with just the M-Audio to ensure that it's real clean and then add the Alesis mixer. The Alesis might not be the best in the world but it shouldn't have a lot of hiss unless something is wrong with it.

Make sure that your eq on the mixer is flat on each channel for starters and mute or turn down any unused channels. :)
 
elduderino said:
I've recently invested in a m-audio fast track interface and a new mic- my old equipment was plagued by noise(hissing etc). I already had an alesis mixer that connected to my computer via usb. I bought the fast track as the guy in the shop said that my current Alesis mixer would be further compressing the signal that gets recorded in to cubase. I asked why the fast track would be any better, they're bot going in via usb. He said the alesis mixer would be compressing it where the fast track would be going full 24 bit in to the computer. Is this right?
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I hate to say it but, you've been given bad information. This is a classic case of "Shitty Mouth" salesmanship.

Mixers are not supposed to compress anything on their own. Unless the master buss has a built in soft limiter/limiter of some type, that's not the way it's supposed to behave. If he is talking about Bit depth and sample rate, the correct term would be "downsampling" or "upsampling" depending on which way you go. One deals with analog signals and the other deals with data signals.

I would ignore that piece of information and focus on the fact that you did change to something that wasn't as noisy as your last console. Assuming that everything is wired correctly, you should be getting exactly what you record into the console.
 
Hi Guys, Thanks for the replies. As I thought I didn't really need a new audio interface. Thanks :)
 
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