Please recommend something to use between the sound card and the active monitors that has absolutely uncompromised quality yet is cheap. Something with really minimal features. Just 2 balanced outputs needed, and 2 balanced and unbalanced inputs and a fader or knob. Mackie Big Knob is really cool, but since it's for multiple monitors, has talkback and various stuff, it's 300 bucks.
Thanks.
Need cheap but high quality control for active monitors
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- Banned
- 487 posts since 14 Nov, 2006
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- KVRian
- 511 posts since 8 Dec, 2004 from Belgrade
Mpatch 2 is great passive controler, worth checking:
http://www.smproaudio.com/MPATCH2.htm
or even nanopatch:
http://www.smproaudio.com/NANOPATCH.htm
http://www.smproaudio.com/MPATCH2.htm
or even nanopatch:
http://www.smproaudio.com/NANOPATCH.htm
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- KVRian
- 759 posts since 22 Mar, 2002 from fi
i've been a mpatch 2 owner for a year now, it's really good and inexpensive. i'm now selling it because i'm planning to build my own little monitor controller (even smaller and simpler, something akin to nanopatch)... too bad we probably don't live in the same country so it wouldn't be much use trying to sell it to you because of shipping costs 
never stop loving music.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 5139 posts since 27 Jun, 2004
Thanks, but strangely both companies fame the products but don't even specify their noise floor levels?
"Music is spiritual. The music business is not." - Claudio Monteverdi
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- KVRian
- 759 posts since 22 Mar, 2002 from fi
Well, I don't think passive attenuation should add noise (well, anything does, but not anything that's worth trying to measure) or anything else. What you basically have with M-Patch is a high quality potentiometer that attenuates the volume (that is, makes it quieter), some switches that select which inputs and outputs to use, a switch to mute the signal and another to sum it to mono. If you aren't using the headphone amp and don't need the lights (I never do), you don't even have to provide power to the device. It's that simple and elegant. The only thing that might do something to the sound is the potentiometer and to my ears it doesn't, really.
If you have insanely long speaker cables, the passive solution like M-Patch is probably not the way to go though, there might be rolloff due to impedance / capacitance problems. And the drawback of passive attenuation is that due to nature of practically every stereo potentiometer, the channel balance is solid only up to something like 60dB of attenuation, go any lower than that and it starts going around. If you can live with those restrictions, getting a cheap passive solution is probably a better bet than cheap active solution (like Big Knob) sound-wise... If you can afford a high end active monitor controller, then things start to look different.
I have to agree that the specs are kind of thin in M-Patch 2 at least, but as everything but the headphone amp is passive and they mention the range in which the potentiometer tracks accurately (down to -60dB), the only additional thing that would really be useful would be the headphone amp's specs.
If you have insanely long speaker cables, the passive solution like M-Patch is probably not the way to go though, there might be rolloff due to impedance / capacitance problems. And the drawback of passive attenuation is that due to nature of practically every stereo potentiometer, the channel balance is solid only up to something like 60dB of attenuation, go any lower than that and it starts going around. If you can live with those restrictions, getting a cheap passive solution is probably a better bet than cheap active solution (like Big Knob) sound-wise... If you can afford a high end active monitor controller, then things start to look different.
I have to agree that the specs are kind of thin in M-Patch 2 at least, but as everything but the headphone amp is passive and they mention the range in which the potentiometer tracks accurately (down to -60dB), the only additional thing that would really be useful would be the headphone amp's specs.
Last edited by z15 on Mon May 21, 2007 8:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
never stop loving music.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 5139 posts since 27 Jun, 2004
It's simple. If a company doesn't want to specify any distortion/noise floor/dynamic range/crosstalk levels, I can't trust the product. Mackie have detailed specifications, I guess they have nothing to fear since their specs are fantastic.
"Music is spiritual. The music business is not." - Claudio Monteverdi
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- KVRian
- 759 posts since 22 Mar, 2002 from fi
Looking at the specs is a good thing, but if you end up with more unwanted coloration in sound with something like the Mackie than with a simple passive attenuator, you probably won't be like "hey, but this one still has specs, and the other's don't", hehe.
I haven't used the Mackie myself and I'm pretty sure it doesn't suck totally, but when I was trying to figure out what kind of monitor controller to get about a year ago, I read more than one comment about people who claimed to have good ears, monitoring and conversion being unhappy with Big Knob, EVEN it has good specs. The same people didn't have a problem at all with a simple passive potentiometer or rotary switch style attenuator. Of course those were the kind of people who would label Mackie mixers as cheapo crap, so unless you're a pro with really good pair of ears, you might not care about the difference. I'm not sure if I would or not.
The point is, a passive attenuator is just so simple a device by design (a high quality pot or rotary switch, some switches and pieces of wire, connectors...) that there's probably not enough things messing the signal path to be worth measuring unlike with active level controls / routers (Big Knob is one, wasn't the Samson unit active too?). It's almost like wanting to hear distortion and noise floor specs for a little piece of cable... It's just so simple it's hard to fsck up - possible as always, but hard.
I'm still not trying to sell my M-Patch for you - in case it sounds like that, I'm sorry. I'm just saying that I've been really happy with my unit and aside the inherent problems related to the type of design that I told about in the earlier post, there seems to be no problems with the sound whatsoever. You can very well have something that has awesome specifications on paper but still more or less sucks, or something that is in fact so simple that it wouldn't be much use to measure if it in fact does anything but change channels and make the volume smaller.
I haven't used the Mackie myself and I'm pretty sure it doesn't suck totally, but when I was trying to figure out what kind of monitor controller to get about a year ago, I read more than one comment about people who claimed to have good ears, monitoring and conversion being unhappy with Big Knob, EVEN it has good specs. The same people didn't have a problem at all with a simple passive potentiometer or rotary switch style attenuator. Of course those were the kind of people who would label Mackie mixers as cheapo crap, so unless you're a pro with really good pair of ears, you might not care about the difference. I'm not sure if I would or not.
The point is, a passive attenuator is just so simple a device by design (a high quality pot or rotary switch, some switches and pieces of wire, connectors...) that there's probably not enough things messing the signal path to be worth measuring unlike with active level controls / routers (Big Knob is one, wasn't the Samson unit active too?). It's almost like wanting to hear distortion and noise floor specs for a little piece of cable... It's just so simple it's hard to fsck up - possible as always, but hard.
I'm still not trying to sell my M-Patch for you - in case it sounds like that, I'm sorry. I'm just saying that I've been really happy with my unit and aside the inherent problems related to the type of design that I told about in the earlier post, there seems to be no problems with the sound whatsoever. You can very well have something that has awesome specifications on paper but still more or less sucks, or something that is in fact so simple that it wouldn't be much use to measure if it in fact does anything but change channels and make the volume smaller.
never stop loving music.
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- Banned
- 487 posts since 14 Nov, 2006
We tested the Presonus Central Station, Mackie Big Knob and Samson C-Control, and of the 3 the C-Control actually had the least coloration. All 3 were extremely quiet, no audible noise whatsoever. In blind testing here in an uncontrolled environment (cuz we're all so out of control....LOL!!!) we all picked the C-Control as the best sounding, but honestly I think they all sounded the same. We ran some electronic testing, and none had outputs that were audibly different from inputs. Doing phase inversion testing, the results of all were silence.