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Old 07-24-2016, 04:44 AM   #3
cyrano
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: Belgium
Posts: 5,246
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That's exactly the line of thought I've followed.

I started looking for a sub, even considered building one myself. Then I decided 5.1 wasn't the way to go. So I scrapped center and sub. The reasoning is that all real "mixing" will be done on four speakers anyway, as the center should only do voice and the sub would be fed a low passed sum in the end.

That's when I decided for 8 identical speakers. I only have 6. They seem to have to be identical.

And I took that down to four speakers, because my recordings won't have height information as I only start out. I hope I'll find 2 additional speakers while I'm starting to learn how to do 4 channels. And I hope adding the extra 4 channels later will be relatively simple.

Problems to fix at this stage:

- panning out of the box between front and rear. No mixers seem to have this, so I'll have to mod a mixer, or stay ITB.
- later on, panning height info, is more or less the same problem, but with 8 channels in stead of four. And that's a hardware problem, as I can find stereo pots to pan between front and rear, but 4 channel ganged faders are rare and expensive. And as I need two of those per channel for four channels, that's doable. With 8 channels, I'd need three four channel ganged pots per channel. That's going out of budget fast, with a total of 24 pots.

I've temporarily scrapped the idea of buying a mixer to mod.

Think I'll either be building my own one. Something like an 8 by 8 matrix mixer. Shure made one years ago, for line levels. But it's a rare beast. I only stumbled upon one for sale here by accident. It's too expensive for what it is (it isn't exactly high end soundwise) and it only controls levels, no eq fi.

Anyhow, the four channel setup works. As a prototype that is. I still have to review the speakers, as they aren't as identical as I would like. Have to figure out if it's the room acoustics, or the speakers.

ATM, I'm thinking about mic setup and mic building for a tetra mic, or one of the other setups.
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