What is the most basic USB audio mixer and easy to use? How many inputs do you need on this mixer, Paul?

30:27And Robert said he's working on some other stuff. Anyway, that's that. Let's go to the next question. I'm trying buttons. Next up is from Paul Valhusan Austin, Texas. What is the most basic USB audio mixer and easy to use? How many inputs do you need on this mixer, Paul? I think Paul Wallace needs like a 48 channel mixer. Just plug all your mics in at once, feed them all into Zoom.

30:59Anyway, Alexander, what you thought? It's hard to suggest a product without knowing the exact requirements. And Chris just mentioned that too. So we don't know how many inputs, how many outputs you want. Do you need effects? I'm assuming this is for live use. there are countless companies that have little usb mixers that you know will record the stereo some of everything just the left right main main bus is what they'll typically uh offer in these

31:27things for example like and i'll just show you just a couple examples and they they make art makes three different versions of this mixer this is the usb mix this is the smallest one with two mic inputs phantom power available only on channel one channel two for some reason doesn't have it USB bus powered for recording to the computer over USB. It gives you the option of what channels you want to record

31:49or do you want to just select it to loop back. And then there are other ones too, and it doesn't have any effects. There's the Mackie Pro FX6 V3. This is the smallest one. You only get, again, one of the limitations of these cheaper mixers is you get extremely limited EQ. You don't get sweepable mids or anything like that. You get a low and a high band.

32:09That is all you get. At least the Pro FX has an FX engine on there and kind of unusual, but they put full-size XLR jacks on the main left-right out, which is kind of a luxury in these cheaper mixers. You know, Aniline Heat has their Z series, which actually I'm a fan of these in terms of the sound quality. The mic preamps, they're a British company.

32:29I think they tend to sound better than a lot of other products in this price range. And again, this ZFX line, they have a whole line of these mixers, starting with the Z10, which is the smaller one with four mic inputs. And it's got an effects engine, somewhat limited effects engine. But it's got some good routing capabilities, USB recording. Again, this does not do multi-track recordings.

32:52So hard to say which one you should go with because I don't know exactly what you need, Paul. So if you want to put another question in. But most of these are pretty straightforward to use. until you start getting into digital mixers with advanced processing. Most of these are fairly straightforward. What I will say is once you understand the basics of how a mixer works from top to bottom,

33:16if you look at the channel strip here, I'll go back to it again, every mixer is going to have a similar layout. So you're going to have your gain pod at the top. You're probably going to have a high pass filter button that you can turn off and on. You're going to have some form of EQ, whether it's just a high and a low

33:31or a high mid and a low or like with a sweepable mid frequency and then your effects and you're probably at least one monitor output send your pan pot left right and then your actual fader now obviously some mixers have an actual physical slider and this particular one because they're trying to save space just has the the pot the the knob actually they're all faders by the way are

33:56potentiometers and these are potentiometers they're just in a knob instead of a slider so So it's the same thing effectively. What? No, you're totally right. I will also say this. When it comes to a USB mixer, and this is what I like about my MixPre-6, the characteristics and capability from that USB port are very important. And whereas with a physical mixer, as Alexander just showed you, you can look down the channel

34:28strip and figure out what it can and cannot do. I don't even have to look at a manual. I see it's got one aux out and it's got one effects out. Well, the effects goes to the little effects thingamajig over there on the right hand side and the aux goes to a port on the back or the top of the thing that I can, you know,