Behringer XAir XR18 Introduction Video

hey guys drew brass through dbb audio i am starting my series on the ex air mixers from behringer and this is going to be the introduction video of the access series of consoles now I have the XR 18 sitting here on my desk but there are four mixers in this series of mixers there's the XR 12 the XR 16 the XR 18 and also the X 18 and if you want to see the differences between these you can check out my blog post right here and basically the main difference of these is going to be the amount of inputs the outputs and then there's the one feature with the X 18 and the XR 18 which allows you to do multitrack recording in and out of the mixer it turns into a USB multitrack 18 in and 18 out sound card when you hook it up to a computer so go ahead and check out that blog post and you'll see a little bit more information but let's go ahead and just dive into this mixer here we can see that down on the bottom we have our outputs now these are going to be XLR outs on the XR 18 there's a few different types of outputs on the XR 12 the XR 16 and X 18 as well but this one has six aux outputs now these are going to be what you'll be using for your monitor output so for wedges or in-ears that sort of thing so this is going to be what you'll want to send out for those monitors for the stage right here we have our main left and right out as well as a stereo headphone jack now the stereo headphone jack it is 40 ohm output so if you are using some balanced balanced amateur IMS just take note of that as it might change the the way that those sound a little bit and we can see that we have our phones level here so if we want to turn up our mix into our headphones you can turn that up or down the next thing we're going to talk about is the inputs we have 16 inputs here as well as two more quarter-inch inputs allowing 18 in on this particular mixer we can see that these are quarter inch and XLR so this is both XLR balanced and unbalanced or quarter-inch TRS which is balanced or quarter-inch TS which is unbalanced we can also note that there are two high V inputs now what's high Z well typically when we were going to connect a n acoustic guitar into our mixer we take the unbalanced instrument cable plug it into the guitar and then plug it into a direct box like this and then plug in the XLR into our mixer now what is this direct box actually doing well it's actually balancing the high impedance of a guitar like a bass or an electric guitar something that needs to see a high impedance load like a pickup and then it converts it to a low impedance load for the mixer itself now a high impedance load on this is going to be about 1 million to 2 million ohms if you're unbalanced or balanced whereas a low impedance like an XLR input or even the quarter-inch input on the non high Z is going to be 5 K to 10 K so I mean that's a pretty big difference that you have there now that one little bit of impedance difference between those can actually make your guitar or bass sound quite different than if you're going into an amp or plugging into a direct box so one thing that bear injured is they put the two high Z inputs on this so we can actually forget about our direct box and take our quarter inch and plug directly into the either of the high Z inputs now on the XR 18 it is 1 & 2 on the XR 12 and the XR 16 they're actually the metal quarter-inch jacks that are on the side and they are labeled high Z now the next thing that we're going to have up here is the actual kind of control of the mixer now we can see that there's no faders on this mixer now that is because we're going to be using an iPad a tablet or a computer to actually run this and mix so we can see up here in our remote section that we have an Ethernet jack this is going to be a 10100 network and it needs to be a standard cat5 table it can be a cat5 cat5e or even a cat 6 if you wanted to get that as well now this does not need to be a shielded twisted pear you can just go get a normal run-of-the-mill cat5 cable UTP which is unshielded twisted-pair grab that you can connect it right in here and then connect this to your router now one other thing to note is this mixer has this capability called Auto mdi-x which means that you can take the other end of this network cable plug it directly into your computer and now we can run a network between our computer and the mixer directly without a router now in the past you'd need to use a crossover cable for that sort of thing but because this has the Auto mdi-x feature it'll enable this to not need a crossover cable to run that the next thing that I want to mention is this has its own Wi-Fi network and card built into this mixer now there's this little switch right here so if we wanted to switch between Ethernet and go to Wi-Fi client or an access point you just move this little switch now Wi-Fi client means that it is going to connect to this mixer to an already established Wi-Fi network so that means that if you have your own Wi-Fi network set up in your venue all you have to do is switch to Wi-Fi client connect into the mixer and apply it to connect to that one network lastly we have our access point now if you switch to this that makes this mixer actually create its own Wi-Fi network using the Wi-Fi on it and so we can actually create our own Wi-Fi network grab our tablet apply the same network settings on that tablet and we can now magically connect into this using that now if we want to we can actually switch this antenna out for something that's a little bit more high gain if you decide to do that make sure you check your local regulations first but this is an SMA R P which means it's a reverse polarity SMA connector so you'll just want to keep mind of that that you will need to get an SMA RP connection to be able to connect it into this but if you are going to be mixing in a in the area that has a lot of Wi-Fi connections or a lot of people with their cell phones chances are you're going to run into some interference and unfortunately this has a little bit of a track record of not doing so hot in an hi inin Fearon Syria with that being said probably the best way that you can use this mixer is through the Ethernet port and actually connect this into a dedicated Wi-Fi network and use that Wi-Fi router as the main source of the Wi-Fi now why would you do that well one it has two antennas instead of just one now granted there is a Wi-Fi card inside of this mixer and there is a Wi-Fi antenna built into that Wi-Fi card but as you can see this is all metal so any Wi-Fi that's applying being sent from the inside of this isn't going to go too far so just keep that in mind that if you can get a Wi-Fi router outside of this connect it through the Ethernet jack and get that into a place where you can have line of sight with that Wi-Fi router you'll have a lot better chances of getting this thing to work really nicely in a high interference area next thing we have is a MIDI in and out port you can use MIDI with this which is pretty awesome the next thing that we have is USB now the XR 12 and the XR 16 have a standard USB port where you plug in a flash drive into it and it would record a stereo WAV to that which is pretty cool but the ex 18 and the XR 18 have this USB port just like the x32 however when we plug our USB cable into this and plug in the other side to our computer we now have an 18 in 18 out USB interface which is pretty awesome now with PC or any of the other types of operating systems we'll need to download the drivers with Mac it does work with core audio so you don't need to download any drivers for that as it's already going to work with the drivers that are installed on your Mac so all we have to do is plug this into our computer make sure that we have our drivers enabled and now we can record 18 in and 18 out of our favorite daw that we have installed on our computer pretty awesome now the another really cool thing about this mixer is we have the ability of setting the gains of the XLR and the gains from the USB separately so that means that I can take this cable plug it in here and use a program called waves multi rack or there's another one called Carla and I know that there's another one called live professor there's a couple different programs out there now what these programs allow you to do is actually use this as your main source of the audio from the stage take your USB send all of these sixteen channels into that program apply some really fancy effects from wave like the c6 or an 1176 or any of the VST or au effects that we have in our tools and then actually put the channels back into the mixer and then mix it with your iPad or app or program that is on the computer pretty awesome the next thing that we have here is our ultra net now ultra net does need a shielded cat5 cable so don't try to use an unshielded twisted-pair you will need an STP cat5e connection for this so it does need to have the metal jack on the on the termination of these leads and once you have that you can plug it into alternate and then plug in the other end into your P 16 monitors your distribution or even to any ultra net enabled speakers like the turbo sound IQ series which is pretty awesome so you can use this as an output for those devices now one question that I do know that I'm going to get because I've seen it in a lot of places is can I use this mixer with the x32 can I integrate this with the x32 as a stage box no you cannot this isn't this own mixer the x32 is its own series so the X air and the X 32 are completely different as far as protocols go so you cannot use this as a stage box for the X 32 now if you did want to use this as say a media mixer for mixing some of your AV inputs and then put the stereo out into your X 32 you could do that that would be one way of adding some additional inputs but there's no way of actual implementing this as a stage box for the x32 some other cool features of this is it is 18 channels and it has four internal effects racks inside of this that you can use for reverbs you can use them for chorus effects and you can even use those effects tracks to insert on channels just like the x32 in fact the same effects that we have on the x32 are the same effects that we have in the ex air series so any of my x32 effects tutorials will go hand-in-hand with this as well the last thing that I have to say about this is it is a pretty awesome and robust little unit it's made out of metal it has some pretty nice rubber things on the bottom there are ears to be able to mount this in a rack and I'm pretty excited about this so over the next couple weeks I'm going to be releasing some new videos on actually diving in and using this I'm actually putting some audio through it and showing you how to actually use it so if you have any questions feel free to post below but make sure you first check out the blog post that you can see right here and chances are some of the questions that you're going to have answered in that blog post is there's a little bit more information on the blog post than there are in the videos lastly please subscribe to my channel so you'll be up to date with the most recent videos and then putting out otherwise thank you so much for watching this

Channel: Drew Brashler

Views: 210,715

Keywords: Behringer, Behringer XAir, Behringer X-Air, Behringer XR18, Behringer XR12, Behringer X18, Behringer XR16, X-Air, XAir, XR18, X18, XR16, XR12, Behringer XAir Tutorial, Behringer XR18 Tutorial, XR18 Tutorial, XAir Tutorial, XR16 Tutorial, XR12 Tutorial, X18 Tutorial, Behringer XAir Walkthrough, Behringer XR18 Walkthrough

Id: gwd3amcZ-hA

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2017