Sound Devices MixPre II Series Audio Recorders Review

in this episode a look at the mixed pre 2 series recorders from sound devices [Music] in this episode we're taking a look at the mix pre two series audio recorders from sound devices common question asked these days with clickbait titles is is it any good and the answer of course is yes it is great I actually reviewed the original mix Prix series recorders you can look at that review up here and the mix pre two series is everything that recorder is plus some additional features the mix pre two series is actually a series of recorders there's a mix pre three to the mix pre six two and that makes pre tend to the major difference between them is the number of inputs but there are also some other differences as well the biggest question is how does this compare to the zoom f6 we'll take a look at that a little bit later in this episode but the big question I think is how does it sound compare it to the zoom f6 well here's what we do know the zoom f6 has the same preamplifiers as a zoom f4 f8 + f8 n we know what those sound like and I've done a number of tests on those we also know that the mix pre 2 series has the same preamps as the original mix Prix series I do have a comparison of the zoom f8 and the mix pre 6 the original so you can actually listen to those to hear the difference between the preamplifiers now there may be some other differences here too they have new converters in both of the zoom f6 and the mix pre 2 series but if you want to preview there's a little difference what it sounded different to my ears was the mix pre sounded ever so slightly warmer you can make great recordings with both of them but the mix pre did have a little bit more bass response to it and to me it sounded pretty nice for dialogue [Music] first and probably foremost I would say the headline feature is a new wide dynamic range 32-bit float recording capability now if you're not familiar with the concept of wide dynamic range what that means is you can record very very quiet things and very very loud things without changing your input setting and on previous generation recorders you might run into problems there where the loud loud sounds would clip and distort because they were just too loud so here's a demonstration in much more detail of how that works in this audio clip we've recorded dialogue at three different levels first of all in this portion right here at 45 decibels a game that's about where I would normally put it you can see here I leave plenty of headroom in case someone laughs but we're getting a good strong signal so good signal-to-noise ratio if you will so nice healthy levels without pushing the boundaries here and I will see what that looks like in just a minute this next section was recorded at +6 DB of gain on the mix pre 10:00 to now plus 6 DB of gain is the lowest possible gain trim setting you can set on the mix pre 10 and actually the 3 and the 6 and that's what that looks like right now it looks like it's basically non-existent but we will find that that's not necessarily the case and then finally we recorded this last portion at 76 DB of gain that is the highest possible gain or gain trim or input setting on the mix pre 2 series and you can see here this audio is completely clipped well normally when you're recording 24-bit audio or 16-bit audio that would be clipped and that would be the end of the story you wouldn't be able to fix this effectively in post and it would sound something like this I've actually reduced it a little bit so it won't hurt your eardrums this is what it sounds like for those not familiar with clipped audio ok the game is now set at plus 76 DB that is the highest possible game input setting you can go on the mix pre 10 okay so you can see how it has that sort of buzzing distorted sound to it if you overdrive or set your game too high that's what you'll end up with on a normal recording however this is not a normal recorder we have the wide dynamic range capabilities so if we highlight that here in Adobe addition we're gonna pull that down and you can see here we've reduced it by about 19 and a half decibels and lo and behold all of the transients the peaks here are back they were just hidden before they were actually there but they were hidden on a 24-bit or a 16-bit recording they would be just completely chopped off and your recoverable this is what it sounds like now okay the game is now set at plus 76 dB that is the highest possible gain input setting you can go on the mix pre ten and in this case I can see that the meters on the mix pre okay that sounded pretty good let's go ahead and check this second portion here where we recorded it at the lowest possible gain setting namely +6 dB let's go ahead and bump this up I can bump it up at 15 decibels per move here so that's 15 30 45 we can add maybe another five here or so so that puts us right around 50 decibels of post-game that's all digital gain so that's gonna bring your noise floor up as well as everything else let's hear what that sounds like now all right the game is now at +6 DB that's the lowest gain or input setting you can set on the mix pre pretty good normally if you raise something like that you would have a massive noise floor year would be recording your dialogue buried down in the noise floor and when you brought all of it up this so-called silent portion would be a massive noise let's bump this one up so it's about at the same level as these other two somewhere right around there I realized this transient right here is actually clipped I just clipped it now I would normally compress that first but just so you can hear what it sounds like okay first off we are recording at 45 dB let me just explain the setup here I have a DPA 40:17 B shotgun microphone boomed over me excellent okay let's go ahead and measure compare the practical noise floor sections in each of these recordings I took a pause and stop talking for just a moment and let's go ahead and measure that and see where that comes out normally I'm looking for that I call this the practical noise floor I'm looking for that to sit somewhere around ideally less than minus 60 in the finished master audio and the raw audio like this I'd like to see it under minus 65 at least but let's see where it sits here in this case we're at minus seventy two point three two RMS that's good definitely usable on the one that was under recorded or that is to say the gain was set far too low than you normally would let's see where that one sits now ones at minus seventy one very very usable on a 24 or 16-bit recording this would be a massive noise right here in most cases alright for the one that was recorded way hotter than it should have been at plus seventy six DB that one also comes in at minus seventy one virtually the same across all of these that is really really impressive so now I don't want to encourage sloppy recording because I think some people might be tempted to say oh I don't even have to worry about gain now I can just fix it in post and that's generally gonna be true I have notice though that the audio sounds is just a little bit different at the various gain levels let me play each of them just really quickly a little bit about each of them and let's take a look at the frequency analysis for each of them and see what it looks like so first of all just a little sample of each okay first off we are recording at 45 dB let me just explain the setup Here I am alright the game is now at plus 6 DB that's the lowest game or input setting you can set on the mix pre okay the game is now set at plus 76 DB that is the highest possible gain input setting you can go on the mix pre 10 it's not interesting to me the one that was set at plus 70 60 B sounds substantially different it has a different timbre to it all together let's take a look at him here if I highlight each of them and do a frequency analysis scan on each of them alright so that's the one that was recorded at 45 dB that'll be our red one let's grab a little bit of this guy here this is the one that was recorded at plus 6 dB that'll be our yellow one and then well I like the one that was recorded at plus 76 dB and we'll make that our blue one visually on the frequency analysis chart here they look pretty similar there aren't any massive difference although the blue one has a little bit less going on here what's that around 3 3 kilohertz but I'm hearing a little bit of a difference so if you listen on very very good headphones I actually like the sound of this one here where we're pushing that the preamp pretty hard for my particular voice it's gonna be different for everyone but I think the overall story here is that the mix pre wide dynamic range recording capability is truly impressive you can do things that you could never do in the past I do not encourage people to be sloppy I don't think this is a good way to do things I don't think this is a license to do that but nevertheless if for some reason you find yourself in a situation where a setting didn't get set quite right you have some opportunities here but I think more importantly this will be useful for those really wide dynamic range recording opportunities such as raindrops and thunder claps at the same time such as jet flybys or perhaps gunshots things of that nature sound effects where you do need that wide dynamic range and then you can work on it and pose to do whatever you want with it from there another new feature on the mix pre 3 & 6 2 series is that they now have inbuilt time code generators before they had timecode inputs but not inbuilt timecode generators now timecode is a huge topic that we don't have time to cover here I'm going to cover that in a lot more detail in a future episode but suffice it to say that's one less external timecode generator that you have to buy that is to say you don't have to buy as many tentacles inky's ambient nano lockets timecode systems ultra sync 1 whatever it may be of the different timecode generators available out there because you have one built into your audio recorder you don't have to buy one for your recorder you just have to buy one for each of your cameras all of the mix pre 2 series recorders now can record at sample rates up to 192 kilohertz in the previous generation the mix pre 3 could only go up to 96 kilohertz that's important to you you now have that option the original mix Prix series had very high quality analog limiters that is to say limiters that would actually pull down the san if it got too loud suddenly so it could save some of your recordings and prevent them from clipping and distorting however those limiters were really sort of optimized for dialogue recording they weren't really optimized for sound effects and now in the new two series of mix Prix you can actually adjust the settings on those limiters to work a little bit better for sound effects recordings one of the criticisms of the original mix Prix series was that it only had a single SD card slot and no backup well the new two series now backs up all of your audio recordings to a USB Drive that you plug into the USB a port and all of the mix pre to series now have a pre-roll buffer of ten seconds what does that mean pre-roll means that when you press record on the mix pre the up to ten seconds prior to that also get recorded with that audio file it's like time travel it can be a really helpful feature if you're working on documentaries or reality type pieces where you're a little late pressing record now you'll actually capture that several seconds prior to the time you press record so can really save you on set when you're working on those kind of challenging situations one of the other questions I've gotten quite a bit since the zoom f6 and the mix pre two series recorders have been announced is how does this all work if I am feeding audio from my audio recorder into my camera do I still get the benefits of this wide dynamic range 32-bit float recording and the answer is yes and no let me explain the answer is yes from a standpoint that if you have the mix preset in the 32 bit float recording mode it will capture the wide dynamic range so if you have a sound source that is peaking at 0 DB full-scale on the meters it's actually still capturing the audio that goes beyond that in the recorder itself however the audio feed that you're sending in the outputs of the mix pre to your camera your camera can't handle that additional dynamic range so on the camera it will still clip so that was a really important thing I think to mention to people so for those that do that workflow things will change for you a little bit if you want to take advantage of the 32 bit wide dynamic range recording you're going to have to pull the file from your mix pre the audio that would get recorded on your camera if the audio meters hit 0 DB full-scale they will clip on the but the audio in the mix pre will still be okay you can swap the mountain post the question that I think everyone is dying to know should I buy a zoom f6 or should I buy a mix pre 2 series let me give you some perspective I each have their advantages and disadvantages let's talk about the advantages of the zoom f6 first the first thing I really like about the zoom f6 is there's an MPF battery sled on the back these are the sony type batteries very very common very affordable you can find them everywhere and it's much larger capacity than a bunch of double a's so these slide right back on the back of the zoom f6 it's very convenient form factor wise it works really well on the mix pre-series there is an add-on npf battery sled you can buy but the batteries stick out it in a little bit of an odd angle for me it's not really an issue because if I have the mix pre in a sound bag I've got room for those batteries to stick out up and down without a problem so this one's a little bit subjective but for those where that's a little bit awkward for you on the mix pre that is an advantage for the f6 the zoom f6 and actually all of the zoom F Series recorders have auto mix this is really helpful when you're recording things like podcasts or panel discussions or interviews and what it essentially does is when the person who is not talking during the interview the auto mix actually turns their microphone down essentially so you don't get the bleed or the sound from the other person bleeding into the person who's not talking their microphone and you don't get the room sound from the person who's not talking and it automatically adjusts itself so as the other person starts talking then it opens up their microphone so on and so forth it can make for a cleaner sounding mix without a lot of effort that's something that the mix pre doesn't have now to balance that out you don't find that auto mix on the zoom F Series recorders to be perfect it actually is not very aggressive so it doesn't attenuate the person's mic who's not talking by very much only two to three decibels so it doesn't make a huge difference but it helps a little bit one thing that the zoom f6 definitely has over the mix pre is that it's less expensive per XLR input so if you consider the six input zoom f6 is $650 the three input mix pre 3 2 is also $650 so you're definitely getting more for your money in terms of XLR inputs with the zoom f6 on the zoom f6 you do not have to worry about setting the input level specifically the gain all you adjust is the fader so what does that mean in practical terms for those that are solo operators it's a one less setting to worry about the zoom f6 also has an add-on control surface you can buy called the zoom F control so if you're going to be recording from a table you know say for example you're doing a panel discussion or something of that nature and you want to actively mix and actually adjust the faders and the gain and the pan and all these other things real-time during the recording that's a really nice way to go and what's nice about the F control is it's purpose-built for the zoom f series recorders so all of the buttons are made specifically for the zoom F series of recorders it's a really nice package it's a little bit on the expensive side it's $350 but it's purpose-built for the zoom f6 and the zoom f4 on the zoom f8 so it works really nicely and finally the zoom f6 comes with the ability to record Amba sonic recordings the mix pre can also do this at least the mixed precip and 10 but the mixed pre 3 just does not have enough input so that's for the zoom f6 at least beats the mix pre 3 now over to the advantages for the mix pre number one first of all there is an ability to backup to a USB Drive so as I mentioned before you can plug a USB Drive into the USB a port on the mix pre any of them the 3 6 or 10 and that will actually make backup recordings of all of your audio clips to the USB Drive that serves a couple of purposes number one you get a backup number two at the end of the day when you're trying to offload your media it's really easy to pull it out of the side and hand that over plug it directly into a computer and download the clips now the zoom f6 only has a single SD card slot so that's where the mix pre 2 series has it beat they have an SD card slot plus the USB backup as I mentioned before the mix pre has a 10 second pre-roll capability whereas the zoom f6 has an up to 6 second pre-roll capability is that a huge difference not necessarily but I leave on the zoom if you set it to a really high sample rates that pre-roll time actually shrinks so there are a couple of factors and settings on the f6 it will actually affect that pre-roll time just seems to be overall better implemented on the mix pre-series on the mix pre-series there is not a purpose-built control surface but you can use third-party control surfaces this is nice from the standpoint that you get more options you can actually buy a control surface from a third party that suits your needs particularly so the downside is that it's not purpose-built for the mix pre but the upside is that you have a little bit more option a little bit more choice and they're far less expensive than the zoom F control so that's something to consider all of the mix pre two series units come with Bluetooth built into them and you can use both iOS and Android apps to remotely control your mix pre which is absolutely awesome so you have a choice of operating system and you also have the ability to quickly and easily enter metadata and notes and things of that nature for each of your audio clips it's a lot easier to do that on a mobile phone or a tablet than it is to try and do it on the interface if either the mix pre or even the zoom f6 now on the zoom f6 you do not get Bluetooth out of the box with a zoom f6 you have to buy an add-on Bluetooth adapter and then when you do have that you only have an iOS app so that is definitely something to consider if you're going to need to use a remote app to control your recorder on the mix pre-series you can control the input gain or gain trim on your recorder plus you still get all the benefits of the wide dynamic range 32-bit recording so you get the best of both worlds now while the mix pre does not have the auto mix feature it does have something called remix which is a little bit different the nice thing about remix is that once you've made a recording of all your isolated microphone channels you can go back and make a new mix of all those microphones you actually just play it back and you actively create your new mix by adjusting the faders on the mix pre and you don't need a computer to do that you do it right on the mix pre now the advantage of that is that you can be more aggressive in reducing the fader on microphones that are inactive so for example if you're recording a cast and there was one participant in the podcast it didn't speak for maybe a 5 or 10 minute period you could just take their fader and turn it all the way down you'll get a much cleaner recording that way downside of course with remix versus auto mix is that it's manual you have to actually run through in real time the entire recording and recreate the mix so it's a little bit of a plus and minus and it really depends on how you prefer to work but it does have some advantages the new mix pre 2 series also have the ability to run the musician plug-in so if you are doing multitrack recording that is to say overdub music recording and you want some additional plugins like for example a reverb or other effects that you can apply to the different audio tracks for your music recording projects then you have this musicians plug-in option it is an add-on software add-on for $50 at the time of this review so it's a nice feature if you are a musician and you want that additional functionality it doesn't change your mix pre from the standpoint that you can still use it as a production field recorder like you would for film or podcasts but it also gives you this additional feature where you essentially switch over into music mode and it now becomes a digital audio workstation without a computer this one's a little bit more subjective but I find the controls and operating the mix pre more ergonomic than the zoom f6 in particular the zoom f6 doesn't have a menu and KOTOR knob and it doesn't have a touch screen so it has these four buttons on either side of the screen that allow you to navigate through the menus and it just seemed a little clunkier to me on the mix pre you have a touch screen and while it's a very small screen they've implemented the touch screen feature very nicely and in addition to that the channel knobs are a lot easier to use from my standpoint and they seem a lot sturdier speaking of sturdier overall I think the build quality is a little bit higher on the mix pre on the zoom f6 the case is very sturdy don't get me wrong a solid metal and that's really good but the knobs themselves seemed a little bit flimsier only time will tell if they hold up as well and they also seem to wiggle around a little bit more so I don't know if that's putting stress on a circuit board inside I don't know we'll have to see over time how well it holds up on the mix pre all of the controls seem very very solid to me and they seem very tight they don't they work in a very precision sort of way and they just inspire confidence in terms of the audio quality versus the zoom f6 they're both very high quality to me the mix pre sounds a little bit warmer than the zoom f6 it has a little bit more low-end response to it so I like that it's not something that most people are going to tell if they're listening on a television or a mobile phone speaker or even earbuds but if you're using high quality playback systems high quality speakers or high quality headphones you can hear a difference and it sounds a little warmer now I don't think I'd make that the sole deciding factor between the zoom f6 and the mix pre but it is a factor and then finally and this is more important than I think a lot of people realize the headphone amplifier on the mix pre is definitely superior to the headphone amplifier on all of these zoom f-series recorders and this kind of manifests itself in a couple of different ways first of all if you're using a high impedance set of headphones the mix pre can drive those where the zoom F series may struggle with those and by high impedance I mean anything over a hundred ohms so that's one thing to keep in mind secondly from my subjective point of view the zoom F Series headphone amp sounded a little more shrill and I think it'd be harder to listen to if you're recording all day whereas the mix pre sounded very accurate and very clean so that's my again subjective assessment of the headphone amplifiers so here's a question I get asked all the time should I buy a zoom f6 or a mix pre three mix pre six makes pre 10 - and I can only answer that from my subjective point of view and my subjective point of view is if I were buying today and I could only buy one I would buy a mix pre now I need to qualify that in a number of ways number one if we get to a point in the future where zoom produces a recorder that has the form factor of the zoom f8 or the zoom f4 but also has the wide dynamic range 32-bit float recording capabilities this decision gets a lot more difficult because those recorders I think have a lot of those features where I feel like the f6 has a little bit of a deficiency that is to say I think the controls are on the zoom f8 and the zoom f4 and I just think overall it works better for the types of recording I do that's the biggest thing about the zoom f6 from my point of view is that organ amelie it's a lot more difficult to use I really feel like zoom made that as a bag drop recorder and what I mean by that is it's something that you stash away in a corner and you're not going to be there to be able to control it while you're recording it's really made for those purposes it's teeny tiny little thing and it's kind of a it's a little bit of an odd shape but it's easy to hide so I really feel like that's what it was made for and as soon as they produce a larger form factor recorder again I think they're going to be a little bit more neck and neck between the mix pre 2 Series and the zoom F series I also want to qualify one other thing before we go here if you were watching this and you already own one of them you own maybe a zoom f4 zoom f8 and f8 n a zoom f6 an original mix pre one of the mix pre two I'm not here to justify your purchase and honestly I don't care which one you bought what I can say as I own all of these well the f6 hasn't arrived yet but otherwise I've used it and I own all of these and I can say this with confidence you can make fantastic recordings with all of them there are differences yes but you can make absolutely great recordings with all of them it really comes down to your skill level and putting the toolset to use in an effective way so it really comes down to you learning how to use and get the most out of your recorder speaking of that I do have some courses shameless self plug here if you need a recorder course for the zoom F for the zoom f8f a 10 through mix pre we had all those courses available over at school learn light and sound calm our mix pre course will be updated to account for and cover the new features in the mix pre 2 series it'll be the same course but it will have some additional video segments for the mix pre 2 series and if you've already bought that course you just get the new videos you don't have to pay anything more it's already gonna be part of that course as well so if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound you soon [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 84,981

Keywords: Audio, sound, recorder, field recorder, sound devices, sounddevices, MixPre, MixPre II, sound devices Mixpre II, Mixpre 3 II, Mixpre 6 II, Mixpre 10 II, review, Zoom f6, comparison, versus, vs

Id: 8lRVnMO14k8

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 06 2019