Hi all,
After gathering enough information about the accessability and usability of the Mixpre-3 for the visually impaired, I finally came to the conclusion to purchase the Mixpre-6 given its extra channels. However, I'd like to use your help to determine if the Mixpre-6 can do what I want.
1. The Mixpre-6 is primarily advertised as a field recorder and I have no issues with that. But I want something which can do some sort of sound-mixing. I don't want to apply effects or use equalizers, but I want to be able to connect two or three XLR mics to the Mixpre-6, move all of them to the center of the so-called audio or stereo stage, and connect the Mixpre-6 to my laptop in order to live-mix the output of the microphones with the music which resides on my laptop. I also want to be able to mute all mics at once. Perhaps more important than that, I want to move the music sound gradually above or below the voice of all three XLR mics. Do you think the Mixpre-6 can do all of that? And can I increase-decrease the volume of the XLR mics at once to have the music fade in or fade out? For instance, I want for the music to fade gradually in order for a host or guest to start speaking with the music in the background.
2. I have seen some professional sound engineers do something strange, or strange in my view, even when they have USB mixers at hand. To bring in music from a laptop, they connect mixers to the headphone output of laptops instead of relying on a USB connection to achieve that. They say that such a connection is more stable than using USB to send audio from the laptop to the mixer. What do you think? Does what they say hold some truth? And is the Mixpre-6 capable of doing both?
3. With the Mixpre-6 I can use its built-in audio recorder, and that's really a boon. But is the built-in recorder capable of generating a single stereo mix of all channels, or does it provide me with separate tracks for each channel? Or maybe both? And are all volume changes I make to the music/XLR mic outputs captured by the recorder similar to what dedicated mixers do?
4. Finally, may I know how many aux sends the Mixpre-6 has? And do they have, or maybe does it have, its own volume control?
Thanks for your invaluable opinions and answers.
Best,
Amir