Has anyone used the Yamaha MW-series mini-mixers? They are small mixers, aimed at the home studio market, with built-in USB interfaces and compression on the first 2 or 4 mic channels.

Apologies in advance - this could be a fairly long "setting the scene" post

I've got an application where I need to take signals from potentially 3 mics, a CD or two, and a line-leve feed from an external PA, combine them, and feed them into a PC. It's actually a OB setup for a radio station, but for the purposes of this discussion let's imagine it's simply for recording, as I guess that will be a more familiar setup to most people here.

Currently I'm using a Yamaha MG mixer, with the main output running into a Lexicon Alpha USB audio interface, then on to the PC. The mics and CD are used by the presenters before and between acts; when a band is playing these channels get muted.

It all works well normally, as long as someone is watching the levels. However, I have found that as the night goes on, and ambient sound levels rise, the presenters get (much!) louder, and before long the inputs are distorting. The CD and feed from the desk, of course, stay at the same level (we would ask the FOH engineer to ensure that our mix has a limiter).

Also, we may have different presenters/guests, all with different vocal levels.

In theory, all we need to do is get the presenters to keep an eye on their levels ("keep out of the red!"), but in practice they'll only glance at the metering very occasionally, if at all. There's no dedicated engineer present.

So, "plan A" was to put compressor/limiters on the inputs of the mic channels to give a bit more leeway. It means more spaghetti, and more knobs for unskilled fingers to twiddle, but it would probably work.

However, I then thought about the Yamaha MW series - of which I have no experience at all, but the spec looks interesting. It looks like a fairly simple small mixer, but with compression built into the first 2 or 4 mic channels (depending on model). The other nice feature is that it has a built-in USB interface - this would mean I would have one box less to carry. In theory, our whole OB unit could be a flightcase with laptop, this mixer, a CD player and some mics.

But I have never played with one.

Is this "one-knob compressor" any good?

Bruce.

Hey Bruce, did you ever find the answer to this?

Hey bruce

We've got an MG206C-USB and quite frankly the comps are worthless. You'll do much better to get hold of a 4ch behringer one off ebay, which actually does something.

Of course, the MW series could be totally different!

M

Our little mw (12 chan) is great, the comps work fine, for a quick vocal tweak, but no more. runs a bit hot though

I have an MG124C and considering the price, I think these compressors are reasonable. The "one-knob" interface obviously doesn't give much control, but it does do a bit of compressing. If you can afford it go to outboard compressors - Behringer, or much better, Dbx.

Dj Dunc, apologies if you already know this, but I suspect the reason it would seem to run a bit hot would be that turning up the knob increases the gain as well as reduces the threshold on the compressor.

HTH
Chris

Chris, that's a very interesting point about the gain. Something I'd not considered, perhaps it says this in the manual (I've never read one) but it's certainly something to think about.

As for

The 166 perhaps, though IMO they're no better. I find the cheap 266's very nasty and would prefer the behringer. There are of course much better things on the market. Drawmer dl221's can be had for little over £100 on ebay from time to time. I'd put these against ALOT of compressors on the market.

the 266s are actually quite ok but there's a knack for using them, which seems to be to drive them harder than you would with a normal comp.

of course take this with a pinch of salt coming from a guy who still gets confused by the fact that the threshold knob on our drawmers goes a different direction to those on our B* and DBX inserts racks!

M

But we all do that.......