Difficulty setting up new Alto ZMX 52 mixer and microphone with windows 7 laptop?

[Jeremy Ward]

I recently bought a Alto ZMX 52 mixer and a prosound microphone. I use a HP Pavilion windows 7 laptop. The way I have ''attempted'' to set up the mixer for home recording is as follows. I bought a small (PC headphone style) jack to RCA cable. Plugged the jack into one of the two small headphone socks in my laptop, and the other red and white end to the corresponding left and right RCA female inputs in the mixer in the 'aux in'. I plugged in my headphons into the 'phones' socket on the mixer, and the microphones 1/4 inch jack (it doesnt ue a standard mic input, although I was wondering if I need to buy one), into the ''Line BAL/UNBAL'' input.

When I open cubase it records, but just using the inbuilt mic in my laptop. If I tap the external microphone thats plugged into the mixer the sound bar in reaper does not get higher.

I took the microphone out from the 'LINE BAL/UNBAL' socket and put it into the second tracks 2/3 LINE L MONO socket. Now when I tap the microphone I can hear it faintly through my headphones. However, I still can't record using reaper using the mixer. It still picks the sound up from the laptops microphone.

I went into sound settings and tried changing the input to all the different options but none of them worked.

Any help?

 

[Armistice]

I'm not following you. No laptop I've ever seen as "two small headphone sockets"... one of these will be a microphone input, the other a headphone output. Firstly your recording program needs to be told where to look for input, so that's in the Options menu somewhere. Secondly if you're running (what will be) a (line level) signal out of a mixer into a microphone (level) input then you have a level mismatch and it's going to sound crap and overload very easily. Thirdly, it's going to sound crapper because your laptop doesn't have a quality sound card for recording.

Read all the sticky threads up the top of the forum and work out what an interface is, what a mixer is used for (probably nothing in your case) and how all this stuff plays with each other.

What you're trying ain't gonna work all that well...

 

[Lt. Bob]

also from your description I'm not seeing where you plugged any mixer outputs to any input of the puter. You said you plugged the headphone out to the mixers input. That's only for listening to something from the puter to the mixer.
But you need the mixer's output to go to the puter for recording.

 

[Jeremy Ward]

I am completely new to mixing and recording so bare with me.
I have managed to get the mixer to record from the mic onto sound recorder on the PC. The setup is as follows:

- Microphones 1/4inch jack into the Line BAL/UNBAL female on mixer (1st channel)
- Headphones into the phones socket on mixer
- Red and white male RCA's into the AUX OUT. The other end of this goes into the mic input on my laptop.

Now, there are two buttons under the title 'aux' on my mixer. One says 'to phones' the other 'to mix'. When none are pushed in, I can hear the microphone through my headphones. I can sing and hear my voice. If I push the 'to phones' button in, I stop hearing the microphone. If I press the 'to aux' I can still hear the microphone.

What do each of these do and what are their purpose?

Now, I can record using this setup into sound recorder. In windows 7 if I go to control panel-hardware and sound-sound-recording, the default mic is called 'External Mic IDT High Definition Audio Codec' and it is the microphone plugged into my mixer.

So when I record in sound recorder it works. However, I can't seem to get it to record in cubase or goldwave. I am using Cubase 5. I have installed ASIO 4 ALL.
Here is what I have tried:

- Open an acoustic + vocal template.
Then a box appears called 'missing ports'. There are two drivers here both labeled unmapped called ''ASIO DirectX Full Duplex Driver High Definition 1 and 2". If i right click these I have three options ''Not connected, not connected 1, not connected 2''.

I have no clue what settings to look for after this in Device Setup.

I'd really appreciate any help.

Lastly, although I can hear myself through my headphones with this setup, when music is played on my PC it is played through the PC speakers, not my headphones (hardly useful for multi - tracking!).

Any help?