On 2005-01-31, Matthew Blake wrote:

3. looking at the 1620 it has 8 xlr microphone inputs, does this mean i
can only plug eight mics into it or is there some kind of xlr to 1/4"
converter out there that would allow me to plug in more mics at a later
date? would that work or would that not be as good? why?

The "adapter" would be a mic preamp. These range from "total crap" that
would be far worse than the (pretty good) preamps in your mixer, all
the way to "good enough for a studio with an unlimited budget and golden
voices." Then there's the interaction between the mic and the preamp,
that can be good or shiddy and not necessarily a function of price or
reputation.

Notice the threads where studio guys have everything they could possibly
want, and are looking for stuff to buy? It's always, Mics, Preamps, and
Monitors.

Your Mackie is a pretty good mixer, and it won't be the weak link in
your signal chain.

5. what are some uses for tape in/out?

Plugging a tape deck in to play break music between sets without having
to spend two input channels on it.
Recording the main mix to a tape deck.
Adding effects and eq to a 2 channel source.

6. do i have to record 12 tracks at a time (even if most are empty)

No.

7. if i've recorded a bass track and now want to add guitar, im
listening through my headphones and want to hear the bass track i'm
playing to and want to hear the guitar track as i'm playing it without
having the bass reference track get mixed into the guitar recording,
this should be a non-issue with the mackie since it records individual
channels right?

Monitoring latency could hurt you here, but you have the right idea.
You can record a part, and then monitor that part on an output channel
while recording another part on an input channel, without crosstalk.

8. would a good way to do this be to send the output of my soundcaVrd
into one of the inputs on the mixer? that way i could easily control
the volume of the reference track? my soundcards output is a stereo
rca output, do i just get rca to 1/4" adapters and plug them into a
stereo line input?

That usually works, but there are some gotchas related to different gain
levels. But a typical consumer output level will work just fine plugged
into a Mackie 1/4" line input.

9. what would be some standard uses for the stereo return?

Send and Return work in pairs, or sometimes a 3-way. You take a mono
send, that's the output of the channel, sometimes before the fader,
sometimes after, and sometimes before the gain stage, and sometimes
after, and you send that to an effects loop or whatever, which can send
back a stereo signal (because many fx have mono inputs but send back two
channels.) So you have stereo returns.

11. and finally, this has nothing to do with mixers but i keep reading
about compressors,it seems everyone has a compressor.

I don't care much for compression, but I just record piano and flute,
classical style, and compression is pretty much the opposite of what I'm
trying to do. I want to maximize the space between the top of the
meter and my signal. The idea of a compressor is to minimize that
space, basically, "make it louder", at the expense of the range between
the quietest and loudest pieces.

Compression probably makes sense for some of your drum work, or to put a
vocalist on top of a mix, or if it bothers you that your recording has
dynamic range. The goal of today's pop music seems to be to fit the
entire track into four bits.

Why did you spend money on 24 bit hardware, if you were only going to
use four of them?