Ampex MX-10, MX-35 As A Possible Model For Group Project?

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Add tubes to your audio system and ad hiss, 60~, microphonics, and unreliability to your audio system.

Ok, the old tube amplifires sounded different. That is because 9 out of 10 used a simple unregulated pi filter, and if they did regulate the plate voltage it was near the top of the 1.414 rms value so when lots of lows or lots of power was required, the thing started to starve for power. So what one heard that was different was a power starved amplifier.
 
I dunno, a lot of the old tube boxes, and some new ones too, are pretty reliable.
 
Well made tube stuff is not unreliable and noisy by nature. The REDD47 tube preamp I made is as quiet as the Phoenix Audio DRS-1 I had and sounds a lot better IMO. I also have an all tube Tek scope from about 1952 that works perfectly. The only maintenance I've done to any tube gear is to replace old electrolytics when needed. Big deal. Well designed tube gear that's taken care of isn't any more a problem than anything else. Just my 2 bits.

Steve
 
[quote author="VerbTank"]Add tubes to your audio system and ad hiss, 60~, microphonics, and unreliability to your audio system.[/quote]

LMAO! :green: It's amazing the kinds of things people will pretend to know on the internet!

Peace,
Al.
 
a long time ago in a galaxy far far away I used to have one of these mixers, I sold it and have never once missed it. Perhaps its just my taste but I never thought it was anything special, if I was to go through the absolute horror and hassle of building a little mixer I would chose something I think a little more special than that thing. Just one guys opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. I think you'd probably wind up with a way cooler thing adoping Jacob's tube pre into a mixer format. If I wanted a more "classic" design, Id look at langevin or rca before that mx10.

dave
 
Maybe we should talk a little more about doing a cool little tube mixer project.

Who else has any good ideas?

Do we have other examples or models?
 
I'm going to concur with Dave on this one. I bought a MINT MX-10 for $250. I was so excited. Then I used it for a couple years and slowly fell out of love with it. It was great on guitars but lacked the headroom to to do much more than record Champ sized combos. Nice distortion box I suppose. I made a lot of money when I sold it on ebay. :green:

As far as a small tube mixer, I don't see the real point unless it was modular. I'd rather have tubes preamp and a seperate summing box to feed it.
 
I think I'd have to agree with the modular approach. At least for a small mixer. More flexibility for pres and make up gain, etc... NY Dave was kind enough to share his idea for an 8 input mixer using 600 ohm stuff. That's looking like a nice thing to try. I'd be curious to hear what you come up with though.

Steve
 
Well we have the Neve and Ampex as potential sources for ideas, we have the Redd and some others were mentioned.

A little tube mixer is the potential project.

Please discuss other ideas or example/models.
 
Well, I know what kind of mixer I want. The other guy knows what kind of mixer he wants. The first thing you've got to sort out is what kind of mixer you want, and go from there. Nobody else can make that decision for you.

I don't think a mixer is really a "group project" because opinions of what constitues a usable small mixer vary so much from person to person. It's not like, say, a preamp, EQ or compressor, where a certain feature set is going to be useful to 90% or more of users. In a small mixer, something "buildable", you have to leave a lot of stuff out, and something that's disposable to one user might be essential to another.
 
Ok, then just for openers, how about if you tell us what you'd want in a small mixer?

You can add your own ideas to existing models or examples if that would be helpful. If you have any schematics for people to view, that would be helpful as well.
 
jcb-

if you search back, Ive posted a lot about the mixer Im building. Its completely simple, uses 312 and 325 cards, passive summing, each channel has a pan pot, a level pot, a pad, mic/line select, buss mute and phantom power. I spent months deciding on the transformers Id used, too long thinking about the buss and everything gets messy when you put it in a box. There isnt anything simple about building a mixer and its really best to approach it from a custom basis, as if you do the wiring point to point, its gonna be all custom anyway. Figure out what you need and design the block diagram, that should take you a few weeks. Once you have a block that you are happy with, put amplifiers in the blocks and figure what kind of amps you want and do it in baby steps. Discussing universal features is folley IMO, start with a block and make the block work, then add the active elements then make your features list. At the end of the day, I didnt do boo special with my mixer and its just like a million other mixers but it took me forever to figure out how to implement things and fit it into a small box. Just remember when looking att commercial examples, many features put on a commercial box are to sell it, not really to make it sound good or easy to use. My box is no frills, designed to sound good and nothing else. NYDave is really right in so many ways, build it to solve whatever problem you need solved, sticking with any kind of standard platform is either gonna leave you with a bunch of features you dont need or not having a bunch of features you do need. If you dont put mic pres in it then obviously you dont need phantom feeds to each channel, you wont necessarily have input transformers, soo many options.

dave
 
Thanks for the link.

I was sort of thinking along the lines of a little 4-or 8-channel tube mixer with perhaps a few extra direct outs per channel and several inserts (per channel?) so you could use some outboard gear such as eq, comp, and verb.

Thoughts?
 
A lot odf extra wiring since it is times 4 or times 8.
You can put line level stuff thru the outboard before thermixer, no?
Maybe one insert on 4 of the channels, the rest straight thru for reliability (no switching phone jack contacts to get tweaked.

If you add a bunch of bells and whistles, then find out the mixer sucks, a lot of work down the frain.
Maybe leave enough sheetmetal room to add later,,after you come up with a design you like.
 
Hmmm, simple might be better.

Do we have anyone around here who has built a little tube mixer or made up a DIY kit?
 
Bump, cuz I'm curious if there are DIY kits floating around for small tube mixers.
 

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