Ask A Sound Guy

I wrote a little bit about the Numark X5 when Winter NAMM was going on, but since its being shown off at Musikmesse in Germany, it seems appropriate to talk about it once again.

The X5 is a heavy-duty looking two channel mixer modeled after their popular NS7 setup. If you read my post about the new Numark gear being shown at Winter NAMM, you’d also see the V7 which has been released. The X7 was made to be paired up with a set of V7 decks and would compliment them nicely. That being said, you’re free to use your turntables and other CD players with the X7, too.

Just like the NS7, the X7 has its own built-in 24-bit soundcard (the V7 has built-in soundcards, too). The outputs include balanced analog and SPIDF and coaxial digital outputs.

You can expect to see the X7 in the third quarter of this year at an American price to be determined.

Numark is showing off their new four channel club mixer, the M6USB. Some noticeable features:

• XLR or 1/4″ mic input
• Metering on every channel (including master)
• Balanced XLR outputs
• USB option for Channel 3: stream audio from your PC/Mac right through channel three. Or, if you don’t want to play music through your mixer you can just record to your computer
• Replaceable, assignable crossfader

Check out numark.com for pricing and availability.

Okay, so there’s been a lot coming out of the Pioneer camp recently. We’ve seen the CDJ-2000 (which will replace the 1000-MK3), the CDJ-900 (replacing the 800MK2), the DJM-2000 (replacing the DJM-1000), and now we have the CDJ-350 (replacing the CDJ-200/400) and the DJM-350 (replacing the DJM-400).  Phew. That’s a lot of new gear.

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Ableton Live is, as you may know, an extremely powerful piece of music software. You can produce, mix, master, and even DJ inside of it with ease.

With Live’s Audio Warping engine and friendly “Session” layout, DJing is a very real possibility. Whether you’re sidegrading from turntables/CDJs to an all digital setup or are an existing Live user looking to use it for all aspects of your musical work, chances are you’re going to need to build a type of live performance/DJ rig.

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I recently dealt with a client that was in need of a 12 channel mixer for use with hybrid live and recording situations. They were looking at either the Soundcraft M12 or the Allen & Heath MixWizard WZ3 12:2. I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I’ve used the 16 channel MixWizard and, as far as smaller format live mixers, I loved it. I’ve never used anything from the M series, but I do know Soundcraft makes solid (and great sounding) gear. So what do I suggest? I had to do a comparison for them, and why not share it with you?

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