What are the pros and cons of using a bag mixer over a sound card? I was reading a post where producers are preferring bag mixers these days. Is this true? Is this a good trend?
ASKED BY · Roscoe Jones · MADISON, INDIANA · 14 OCT 2026 · ▶ 00:44:24
Many sound mixers maintain both cart and bag setups; bag useful for mobile shots in reality TV; limited wireless channel capacity; Spectera won't fit in a bag; 32-bit float recording mitigates some issues but wielding boom and mixing wireless simultaneously highly problematic.
Bag mixers offer portability; can be worn on body harness; suitable for unscripted, documentary, or run-and-gun work.
Portability and ability to hold boom pole simultaneously; trade-off is reduced functionality and channel count compared to cart systems; difficult for one person to manage boom, wireless mixing, and monitoring concurrently.
Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.
From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
43:56But we let go of a little bit of humanity. It's okay to be real. It's okay to be imperfect. And I want to celebrate humans doing things for humans. Let's go to the next question, Alexander. Next up is from Roscoe Jones in Madison, Indiana. But do it very humanly, okay? Do it like a human. Go for it. What are the pros and cons of using a bag mixer over a sound card?
44:24You missed the mark. I was, oh, whoops. I was, I slipped into my robot. I was reading a post where producers are preferring bag mixers these days. Is this true? Is this a good trend? What's the deal, Jason? Okay. Bag mixers are much more portable unless, of course, you walk into Alex Lindsay's hotel room and he fits you with a full body harness and 100 pounds of gear.
44:50Done that. um and then goes hey you can carry the scorpion and the transmitter on your back um all right let's go uh other than the rolling stones beast of burden song yeah no kidding no i'll let mickey answer it for real yeah mickey go ahead yeah uh as jason mentioned the you know uh strapping a bag allows you to be more portable, also allows you to swing a pole at the same time.
45:23Not that you can't swing a pole when you have a cart, but it's much better to have your mixer slash recorder on you as you swing the pole so that you can make adjustments as you go. So in situations where, say, it's unscripted programming or like a documentary or a run-and-gun shoot or even a narrative where you have to be very low profile.
45:47Say like I've shot narratives, full-length features on top of mountains where it's not very feasible to carry a cart all the way up. Then you may want to build a bag system instead. Although with some of those features, somehow they're able to get movie birds and techno cranes up there, but they can't carry a small sound cart. anyway um but yeah you uh you are able to be more nimble in terms of your movement with a uh
46:17when when you're mixing off a bag of course that comes at the cost of functionality um with compared to like say my sound card like my sound cards have full uh Dante systems in them uh we can certainly run way more channels on them we can bring in say you know music playback if there's music playback that can easily be integrated in with a card system or a system with multiple
46:41cards in it um but if you're uh you're in a bag that's that's more tricky you'll um certainly very very quickly run out of uh space uh for a lot for major functionality you want to add in the system so it's really a um a a a toss-up between uh being nimble being able to move fast beyond the go versus having more functionality more channel count in a cart based system
47:14and courtney yeah i see more and more sound mixtures these days that work off of a cart have a bag system put together so that they can jump into a car to do a mobile shot something like that. You know, for reality shows where they've got, you know, four guys walking around with bags following each camera around, that's a lot of useful.
47:34But, you know, you're limited, like Mickey said, in the number of channels of wireless you can support. You're not going to plug in that Sennheiser Spectera system into a bag. It just won't fit. And plus you've got to drag an extension cord around, plug it into your bag. So, you know, that could be a problem and an Ethernet cable. So that's also a problem.
47:54Yeah, so you're limited. And I think, you know, it's become less of a problem with 32-bit float recording. But, you know, wielding a boom and trying to mix four channels of wireless at the same time and bring people up and bring people down as they come in and exit the set, that's highly problematic for one person to do and concentrate on while trying to point the microphone in the right direction, keep it out in front of the person.
48:19and handle the mixing and wireless reception and context for the in-ear monitors for the producer, director, and all of their family and friends that happen to show up on the set and want to hear the dialogue. Yeah, it's just working exclusively off a bag is probably a bad idea unless you're just doing a reality show or news coverage. And, Alexander, let's go to the next question.
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