[Mike Rivers]

On Nov 10, 12:49 am, straightnut wrote:

I should go look at
mixers. I forget what a mixer can do for me except add some EQ before
recording, which I probably wouldn't want to use in the price range
I'm looking anyway.

There are so many levels on which to answer that. The most basic
answer is that the mixer can be the heart of your recording system,
but since some of the functions of a mixer are duplicated (some
better, some worse) in all but the most basic audio interfaces, you'll
start agonizing over things like which mic preamp is better - the one
in the mixer or the one in the sound card.

If you don't use the mixer's mic preamp, you lose the ability to
directly monitor the input and mix it with the DAW playback for
overdubs. That capability is built into some, but not all interfaces.
And you can always get that mix from a DAW program, but it will suffer
the latency of the input source making a round trip through the
computer, which can range in effect from being something you have to
learn to ignore, to annoying, to completely impossible to work with.
Where it is in that scale depends on your computer setup and your own
personal tolerance.

The mixer can also be your monitor controller, giving you a way to
adjust the control room speaker and headphone levels (hopefully
independently) and a larger mixer will give you the ability to hear
different mixes. It can also give you EQ (though most mixers these
days are set up to record straight out of the mic preamp without going
through the EQ stage - because that's what most people want to do).

There's a class of device called a "Monitor Controller" (such as the
Mackie Big Knob or Presonus Central Station) that offer a lot of the
routing and control of a mixer, and there are audio interfaces that
provide a certain amount of monitor mixing and control (such as the
Mackie 400F) but that's more channels than you need for recording
yourself, and more money.

I forgot about the built-in analog soft limiter on the USB unit that
could be useful.

I guess it never hurts, but you'll want to be able to hear what it's
doing so you can decide if it's helpful or harmful. The best tool for
preventing overloads is the input gain control. It's hard to make
decisions about dynamics control when you're concentrating on playing
or singing.