I’ve finally installed a sound mixer in the shack and it’s amazing
As with so many “little” projects like this, it all started so simply last week with the decision to order a good quality set of speakers for my PC. After a little bit of research I ended up getting a pair of M-Audio BX3BT speakers at around £100. Nothing over the top and nothing super loud but at the same time not cheep and nasty. Just perfect for my needs
That then got me thinking, what if I could also connect the speakers to all of my radios at the same time? And at that moment my plans to add a sound mixer to my shack were rekindled into a full on forest fire. This is something I have considered on many occasions but just wasn’t sure what I needed to do or even if it was possible to do what I wanted to do.
Several hours of YouTube education later I had enough basic understanding of what sort of sound mixer I wanted along with a budget of around £130 - £200 and after some searching on Amazon I was ready to kick things off with an order.
I ordered the Gem-12USB 12 channel analogue mixer with Bluetooth which arrived promptly next day along with the speakers.
Once I had the equipment I then worked out exactly what cables I would need and placed the order for those.
Finally, when they had arrived I was ready to start connecting everything up.
All together it took the best part of a day to work out what output needed to connect with what input and once that was all done I took it all apart again, labelled all the cables at each end to make it simpler to reassemble or trouble shoot in the future and put everything back together again. But with proper cable routing and management so it looked like a professional job.
Finally, It has taken another day of playing around with the many dials, buttons and adjustments on the mixer and the radios to get all the different sound sources sounding their best through the speakers.
The result. . . . .Absolutely Bloody Fantastic, and well worth the planning, implementation and cost involved.
And a little foot note, even if it didn’t work it looks pretty cool sat there on the desk just off to my right!