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USB mixer question? Any downsides?

R

Randy Lahey

I'm using an Allen and Heath XB 14 mixer http://www.allen-heath.co.uk/uk/DisplayProduct.asp?pview=110

I'm wondering if there is any downside to using usb. The engineer set it up to run through an audioscience asi4334 soundcard. The only problem was I couldn't record and play audio at the same time. I need to be able to record clips from the internet (youtube etc), and I only have one computer in this studio.

Today I started using USB to bypass the soundcard. It now seems to do everything I want, and the quality seems to be the same as before.

Is there any downside to using usb in a production studio?
 
I'm using a Yamaha Audiogram6 as my main mixer and a Lexicon Alpha to do the recording. Both are USB and both work fine.

As long as you're happy with the sound quality of the USB card there's no "downside" to using a USB card.

The ASI cards add a lot of other functionality (time stretch on the fly, playing multiple streams on a single output) that aren't used in most production environments.
 
Shouldn't be any problems. That mixer is really nice too.

As far as I know, some usb buses can be noisy. Don't know how this problem is caused but I know it's a fact. Other than that, using a usb mixer is the same thing as using a sound card. Signal gets a/d'd and d/a'd just like it would in a regular card only it happens in the mixer instead. My advice if you play stuff from the internet (I do it a lot myself) is that you record and fix them up first if you can. That way you can wash the sound a bit and normalize everything to the same rms so you'll know nothing going to be crazy loud and force you to ride the fader.
 
Randy, I've got a client using one those boards for a production room. It has been working great for them for over a year now. It even doesn't seem to have much of an RF problem. They're a 1k and the stick is about 200 feet away from that room. We have had no noise issues at all.
 
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