Old Mixer Questions

  • Thread starter Thread starter Whyte Ice
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Whyte Ice

The Next Vanilla Ice
One of my friends brought over this huge, mixer that he wanted us to use for recording and such but I have a couple questions. The mixer is a Soundcraft Series 200 8 Channel Mixer With 2 Unbalanced 1/4" Inputs and a Balanced XLR input per channel.

I can tell that this board is old, used, not in the best of shape and it comes with a huge power supply. It is a huge piece of equipment (Width: 17", Height: 21").

First question. There isn't a phantom power switch on the board or the power supply but when I plug in a LD Condenser mic like a Rode NT100, you can hear the input through the monitors just like my other mixer board. Built-in phantom power? There are little Power/Line switches next to each XLR input so maybe thats it?

Second question. There are little buttons all over the mixer and I have no idea what some of the abbreviations stand for so maybe you guys can help. MTR? RET? AFL? SLATE? LI? PAD? Those are all of them.

Third question. Has anyone ever heard of this brand of mixers or this particular mixer? As I said above, it is a Soundcraft Series 200.
 
I'd say your guess on the phantom power is correct.
On the buttons;
MTR= probably assigns a channel to a meter (I take it there's no meter bridge)
RET= no guess
AFL=after fader look. Think solo button. Allows you to listen to just that channel after the fader and EQ section of the channel strip.
Slate= The board prbably has a built in 1KHz tone generator for calibration purposes.
LI= Line in
Pad= a switchable attenuator (probably 20dB).
 
That is the exact same mixer that is sitting in front of me right now.

Track Rat, when you said my guess on the phantom power was correct, did you mean I was right about the little switches or the mixer has 'em built in?
 
I would guess that RET stands for Return, especially if there is an SND button.

Oh the joy of vintage gear without a manual!!!!!
 
sounds like all the *guesses* on the abbreviations are pretty much right on. For "slate", many older boards had a tone, (like 50 Hrtz, or actually less) that was usually engaged with the talkback feature on the board. This way, when identifing a track on a reel to reel, the tone would sound like a "blip" when it went past the playback heads at a much higher speed when on the fast rewind(or forward) speeds...to help find the location of the beginning of songs, for instance.
 
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