Small Cue mixer

[totoxraymond]

Hi everyone,

I'm starting a new project to help my recording workflow here in my small studio.

Let me explain: Right now, I use Nuendo along with an RME FF800 to record music. All is good but i always find the 'low latency monitoring' a bit quirky.
Obviously i disables all the inserts of the recorded tracks so the musician can here himself without too much delay. But then when you do some overdubs on an almost finished mix with lots of compression (i mostly record punk rock, it might get loud), it's hard to judge the performance live.

So my idea was to ditch the low latency thing and setup an analog path for the musician's feedback. Ideally i'd like an analog mixer, but this is a small studio allready packed with stuff (and recording music is not the main use of the studio).

Then i got into this idea: What i really need is to be able to blend one or two mics (ie a guitar and a vocal mic) with the 'Cue' feeds from Nuendo (I have four different Cue feeds setup right now)
So maybe I could make a small mixer in a small 1RU chassis and that would do the trick.

I made a crude block diagram to describe the signal path, see attached.

I will add a Headphone amplifier to the mixer, so i can monitor what's been sent to the musician from the control room.

So, next step will be to design the summing board.



Thomas

 

[Tubetec]

I think the delay varies a bit depending on processing thats being done on the incoming signal , a small set delay you might get away with , but if the delay varies in the ears of the performer it may upset them .

Ive seen engineers who take a mic split early on , one spilt to digital the other to a smaller outboard mixer for the headphones , alternatively a simpler approach would be just use direct outs or aux sends from the mixer to feed your daw . While the interface itself may allow real time monitoring but the signal that goes to the daw for processing and back out to the performer will have a delay , it might not bother a guitarist one bit ,but for a vocalist it might be off-putting in the cans .

Adding back in a side chained reverb on the vocal via the daw isnt an issue with latency for the performer as its only indirect sound your adding ,compression effects which are connected in series are likely a different matter ,

 

[totoxraymond]

Yeah, that's exactly my point.

That's why i thought of this very simple mixer. I won't need effects, Eq's or any processing, just sum the signal from the microphone with the playback from the daw.

Most of the time, this will be used for singers, i don't need feedback when recording my guitars, the amp is already loud enough.

 

[guy_4]

Yeah, that's exactly my point.

That's why i thought of this very simple mixer. I won't need effects, Eq's or any processing, just sum the signal from the microphone with the playback from the daw.

Most of the time, this will be used for singers, i don't need feedback when recording my guitars, the amp is already loud enough.

Hello totoxraymond,
For your setup, why not use a small (second hand ) Mackie/ Berhinger ( you name it ) with 4 mono inputs (or 2 stereo ) , and a headphone output.

 

[Bo Deadly]

Each time you convert between analog and digital and back there is a not completely insignificant delay. If you're routing in and out multiple times from mics to outboard compressors and back, you will build up a significant delay that could easily be noticeable.

IMO all outboard stuff should be done in the analog domain including monitor mixes. Then, feed all analog outs into digital together once. Once the signal goes digital, it doesn't go back. That will give you true zero latency. If you're only converting twice, you could probably get away with sending a monitor mix from software with a few ms latency.

I agree with the Mackie / Berhinger suggestion.

However, note that the circuits in the pro-sumer mixers with really small numbers of channel are not that great. But the ones with 12 or 14 or more channels can be quite good. Something like a really clean Mackie 1202VLZ3 is a great mixer for the money.