The trouble is I guess you might not understand some of what everybody is saying, And the repeated advice is your need to test things one item at a time. Each piece of equipment needs to be understood. There are a lot of variable to the signal path.
For a small mixer it is actually very complicated and I can see all sorts of
wrong ways to hook it up.
But first before you send it back... lets do a simple test.:
Plug in a mike (or guitar ) , turn up the gain, see the meters move, listen with the headphones.
DON"T try and plug cables into the insert jack on channels 1-2. this is probably what you did. I've seen this 100 times before. The writing is UNDER the jacks. So the top 1/4" jack on 1 and 2 is a input for a line level instrument.
The one below it is an
insert for direct output/input to a compressor etc.
MY guess is there is nothing wrong with the mixer and the meters will move and you will hear sound from the headphone output.
Put all controls at 12 o clock for starters, including the input gain, headphones and main mix. I notice there is no peak light per channel so looks like you depress the solo button and the main meter will monitor the input gain.
Make sure the Mute 3/4 button is not pressed either.
Select the "main Mix" for the headphones in the Control room source box.
Yell into the mike and turn the input gain up until the meter lights in the top end of the green.
You should hear yourself in the headphones.
Don't forget to turn off SOLO when finished , the Rude light should be off for normal operation.
Ok see, nothing wrong with the mixer, now lets hook up the interface. You will need 4 x 1/4" patch cables.
There are a few ways to do this and I'll pick one way for now, you can change this latter once you understand things better.
You cute little mixer has a few ways to send the signal out. It's almost a 4 buss mixer. To bad it only has 1 Aux.
So to avoid a feedback loop you need to direct your sound to 2 separate places, Your interface so you can record, and your monitors so you can listen. The trick is to be able to also monitor what you are trying to record without it having to loop through the computer and back which can result in latency.
Therefore the control room outputs and routing are needed. Use the Control room ( CR) outputs to send your monitoring to your power amplifier or powered speakers.
This is one thing I can't test but my guess is the buttons in the control room box will allow you to make a custom headphone / monitor mix. If this is true then it's a simple matter of depressing the button of what you wish to hear.
Do not depress the Control room "Assign to main mix" button or you will get a feedback loop.
For feeding your M audio to Sonar There are 2 other output options , the main and the alt 3/4.
For recording use the main outputs to the M audio Interface inputs.
Now to hear the computers output I would use the M audio's output 1/2 and plug them into channel 7/8. But to avoid it looping back to main out depress the MUTE 3/4. for that channel strip. Now it will be sent to the control room / headphones if you press the 3/4 button in the control room box.
The M audio's Monitor outputs could be used but they are more for direct hook up to a set of powered speakers or amp/speaker combo.
Take Beagles advice and play a song in media player see if the M audio meters move and it should now be coming out your speakers and headphones.
Open Sonar, arm an audio track and select the M audio inputs 1 or 2 for recording.
A standard set up would be to pan each channel at the mixer. I use left for guitar and Bass, and right for my mike. With the mixer you could leave a few things plugged in all the time. Just remember to turn it off if not used.
post edited by Cactus Music - 2011/07/01 03:27:48