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Sound Devices Mix Pre-3 and Mix Pre-6


afewmoreyears

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Hi all, I am really excited about these little recorders.

Does anyone have an idea about these vs the Zoom F8/F4, and/or these vs 663?

Do you have any links from German shops that send to EU?

My impression is that those Sound Devices will be the best selling SDs ever (as their are targeting consumer/prosumer groups, but a lot of professionals will keep one as a backup recorder, or for some features missing in the more expensive SD range), and it is a good thing to see this kind of competition in the entry level category.

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42 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

Hi all, I am really excited about these little recorders.

Does anyone have an idea about these vs the Zoom F8/F4, and/or these vs 663?

Do you have any links from German shops that send to EU?

My impression is that those Sound Devices will be the best selling SDs ever (as their are targeting consumer/prosumer groups, but a lot of professionals will keep one as a backup recorder, or for some features missing in the more expensive SD range), and it is a good thing to see this kind of competition in the entry level category.

633 is CERTAINLY the best mix recorder, by a long shot.  But there's also cost as an important factor. 

If I were doing effects, interviews,  or ambiance,  I'd certainly go for the mix pre 6 or 3. The value is just amazing.  I just think the f4 and f8 were designed with narrative production in mind,  and so they work a little better for those situations.  But also by going with the Zoom,  you lose the trust of the Sound Devices name, which can go a long way with producers. 

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Do you have any links from German shops that send to EU?

I am fairly certain that they all will do that. But then there are shops all over the EU (e.g. Audiosense, AEM, Noyzboyz, etc.), which I know for a fact will happily sell whatever within the EU.
As SD compete against similar devices, wont these new devices need to be available from more vendors and the policy wont be so easy to enforce? Eg John/myself will be able to get 1 from USA with not much consequence for either party? 

I doubt that. SD products are readily available outside the US, at prices that try to reflect local conditions, whatever that may mean. Maybe in the UK they just are afraid of currency instabilities and thus added a safety net. But SD have this sale restriction in place, I believe, to protect the local vendors outside the US.
But yes you can always ask a friend, buy one used, go to the US in person... So SD will repair your unit no matter what.

But the price difference between buying the MixPre 6 in the US or in Germany, for example, is only about €75 (atm). Add to that shipping, import duty, or even your flight ticket and the difference isn't really that great to whine about, to be honest. I don't really get why you'd rather buy in the US than in Belgium or Germany.
Is that why you are leaving the EU?
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4 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Do you have any links from German shops that send to EU?

Since prices seem to be pretty uniform, I'd contact Kortwich or Ambient first since those are shops that have a good relation to professional sound mixers.

If they don't sell it internationally, do a google search with the "site:de" term added

 

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22 hours ago, daniel said:

Enough of brexit - 1 of the really nice things about this MixPre series is the USB audio interface. Obviously being able to go straight into a laptop without additional hardware gives us a redundancy (on cart style setup) but it also allows for something I would like to see on more recorders: waveform metering. Something like wingman could be giving us a function like this on an ipad (without the recorder being a USB interface) but for now a mixpre plugged into a laptop would look like 1 of the easiest (and cheapest) ways of doing this.

So am I really on my own with the waveform metering thing? In an age when there are cheap and various ways to hook various things up to various screens/displays it seems like a no brainer to extend a function common to other recording environments to our 1. Having an option of waveform metering would mean we need to be less attentive to the meters and potentially make it easier to mark, search and label events during the recording or after the recording. Eg. a door slam which peaked on the mix but maybe useable on an iso would not need to be eyeballed in the moment or an intermittent fault on 1 of the channels might be quicker to identify. IIRC, X3 gives waveform on playback, is it really necessary to spend 15k to have this?

A waveform meter could even be used to implement some kind of phase metering as being discussed on another thread:

 

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cvp and pinknoise are based in england, if you read the last few posts above you'll see that in the EU (or germany at least) it looks like it is sold for  for 900EUR net or 1070EUR incl VAT (which is practically no difference if you consider import tax)

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Yes, i saw that, but didn't find actual prices and cvp and pn had always similar prices... And still 1100e vs 900$ is a 300$ difference

How could you not find prices?
Once again, you can feel angry about VAT, but it is NOT a Sound Devices thing, and they do not get to keep it. If you bought your MixPre in the US and had it shipped here, you would still have to pay VAT, even if you bought it in person. There is no legal way to avoid VAT.
But you can reclaim it if you had registered a business

Here are some prices.

1) https://www.aemstore.nl/Locatie-Audio/Merken/Sound-Devices/Sound-Devices-MixPre-6/

2) http://www.audiosense.be/en/sound-devices-mixpre-6.html

3) http://shop.mediatec.de/8-kanal-mischer-mit-aufzeichnung-auf-sd-karten-nutzbar-als-usb-interface-9708?tdpc_origin=pla&tdpc_feed_alias=de&tdpc_pid=9708&gclid=CLbsqJDH09MCFWUq0wod8KgHsw

4) https://www.bpm-media.de/EB-Live-Production/Audio/Mobile-Mischer/Sound-Devices-MixPre-6::437539.html?language=de&gclid=CJ6AiqrH09MCFeUp0wodKmQGwg

5) and so on
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Thank you Conastantin, I didn't know all these local shops.

My familiar Marcotec doesn't have a price yet, maybe it's time to start shopping from a more specialized shop.

It seems that 899 net, is the best price in Europe right now, I say that is a very fair price for such an amazing little machine. I usually am waiting for the first batch to deliver and tested in the real world before buy anything, but I am afraid this little machine will sell out almost immediately, and for the very first time I am considering pre ordering one.

Next step, Zaxcom Zaxx-Y (an hypothetical entry level Zaxcom one)!

This market has a lot of dough, and Zoom and Tascam were eating the pie effortless for too long. Let's see some real competition from now on.

As of the political side of things, Pink Noise/CVP have excellent prices (and bundles) but I am considering EU to be my local market, and even though I have studied cinema in the UK and worked for a little while there, I am moving all my buys and transactions to EU and especially BE/NL/DE were I have very good communication and services. My last video buys were from the Netherlands anyway, and I will keep going on with this trend.

Humans are "zoon politikon" - political animals (Aristoteles).

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I find it useful to build good relationships with local shops and in fact you can get additional discounts once you know them a bit, and they know you.
At the same time, I'll shop around internationally, mostly Europe incl. UK, but I have also bought stuff here and at most of the usual suspects in the US - especially used gear. You know, with used gear SD's and Lectro's sales restrictions don't apply, especially if you buy from a colleague.

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5 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Next step, Zaxcom Zaxx-Y (an hypothetical entry level Zaxcom one)!

This market has a lot of dough, and Zoom and Tascam were eating the pie effortless for too long. Let's see some real competition from now on.

Bring it on!

I for one welcome SD looking into this 'budget/DSLR' market. One shouldn't forget that both SD and Zax have partly made their business and reputations by successfully undercutting the pre (vaguely) 2000 film sound equipment of Nagra et al. Not to undermine the continued innovation and excellent support which really made both companies embraced by our industry.

But before you criticise Tascam too early please remember (or hear) that this company had already done exactly the same thing decades back to provide a 'relatively affordable' alternative to Ampex, Otari and the rest. I still have huge respect for them. The DA P1 and the TEAC version were great alternatives to the expensive HHB and Fostex pro dats. Before that was analogue. I have a '122' in the loft. At the price point the DR70 is still perhaps the best DSLR 4 track. The DR680 as far as I know has more comprehensive ganging capabilities than virtually anything beyond the highest end professional gear. That and its rival the Roland R4/44/Pro has digital in (AES3 or consumer) which neither the new SD nor zoom machines offer, and for 'extra tracks' for sync needing people like us could be a life saver on a budget equipment situation.

But as I said, bring it on. My 3 favourite 'travel' machines have now become the Mix6, F8 and for sheer cost the DR70. Travel not 'work', but that's the budget market.

Jez

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13 hours ago, The Immoral Mr Teas said:

The DA P1 and the TEAC version were great alternatives to the expensive HHB and Fostex pro dats

The TEAC DA-P20 was a rebadged Casio DA-7. The R&D team said they could do better, and thus the DA-P1 was designed. They used the combined experience from the rackmount DAT decks and the portastudio series, everyone was happy with the result.

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I don't have a lot of experience with TC so pardon my ignorance if my question is stupid.

Would it be possible to generate TC from a SD 633 to the Mixpre-6 so I can record long takes on both devices in sync? IF so, how would I go about accomplishing this?

Thanks,
George

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28 minutes ago, pocketworld said:

Would it be possible to generate TC from a SD 633 to the Mixpre-6 so I can record long takes on both devices in sync? IF so, how would I go about accomplishing this?

kinda, you could take the TC out of the SD633 and feed it into the MixPre-6 Aux Input and have it read TC from there. That would give you synched TC, but most likely not a locked clock. In other words, you could easily synch up the two recordings based on TC at any given time, but over a certain length they would likely drift a tiny amount (sub-frame) if the take is really long. so on concerts etc you'd probably have to tweak it in post.

On the Gotham Video linked further up they mention that if you feed TC over HDMI the clock gets locked to the HDMI signal, so in that case it would stay in perfect sync over several hours, so it might be worth contacting SD directly to ask if the Aux In provides the same functionality (in which case my first paragraph is moot)

chris

ps: that brings up a funny idea:
one could get a cheap device that outputs TC on HDMI, a HDMI splitter, and several MixPre-6, which means you could probably build a small 18track (with 12 balanced mic preamps) recorder with locked clock for around 3500EUR net.

 

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7 minutes ago, chrismedr said:

kinda, you could take the TC out of the SD633 and feed it into the MixPre-6 Aux Input and have it read TC from there. That would give you synched TC, but most likely not a locked clock. In other words, you could easily synch up the two recordings based on TC at any given time, but over a certain length they would likely drift a tiny amount if the take is really long. so on concerts etc you'd probably have to tweak it in post.

On the Gotham Video linked further up they mention that if you feed TC over HDMI the clock gets locked to the HDMI signal, so in that case it would stay in perfect sync over several hours, so it might be worth contacting SD directly to ask if the Aux In provides the same functionality (in which case my first paragraph is moot)

chris

 

Thanks Chris, just emailed SD. Will post back as soon as I hear from them.

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On 6 May 2017 at 11:16 AM, chrismedr said:

 

one could get a cheap device that outputs TC on HDMI, a HDMI splitter, and several MixPre-6, which means you could probably build a small 18track (with 12 balanced mic preamps) recorder with locked clock for around 3500EUR net.

 

Or you could just go out and buy a smaller 10 track recorder with 8 balanced mic preamps and TC generation for less than a thousand?

j

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On May 4, 2017 at 9:20 AM, Tom Duffy said:

The TEAC DA-P20 was a rebadged Casio DA-7. The R&D team said they could do better, and thus the DA-P1 was designed. They used the combined experience from the rackmount DAT decks and the portastudio series, everyone was happy with the result.

I have a lot of fondness for Tascam - I still have my venerable DA-30 Dat rack mount unit, which has never eaten a tape, and always sounded great.   The DAP1 was my first sound effects machine.  I still remember recording a distant river and not having the white noise of the running water vanish into analog tape hiss.

It was magical.

Cheers,

Brent Calkin

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8 hours ago, The Immoral Mr Teas said:

Or you could just go out and buy a smaller 10 track recorder with 8 balanced mic preamps and TC generation for less than a thousand?

j

With the addon accessory you can even get 10 inputs

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9 hours ago, The Immoral Mr Teas said:

Or you could just go out and buy a smaller 10 track recorder with 8 balanced mic preamps and TC generation for less than a thousand?

sure you could, but how does this help if you need 18 ISO tracks or more with world clock?
not saying that this is the best idea ever for professional recordings (lots of cables and things that can come loose) but still an interesting option for the experimental folks, specially if you can borrow some extra Mix-Pres from friends.

chris

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The more I think of these two boxes the more I wonder why they have the MixPre name attached to them.

I'm not saying they're bad boxes but without even balanced outputs or AES how can they be MixPre? Why wrangle them into that product line? 

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yeah, I had the same thoughts, to me they look more like splendid little ISO recorders (if the preamps live up to the promise)

But probably their target group are a lot of DSLR users, where one could argue that it will indeed mix 3 or 4 balanced mics to the unbalanced stereo input of the camera, with the ISOs as a backup.

Or maybe they figured that the original MixPre has a very good reputation and thought why not keep using that name.

chris

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