Mixing Board

September 29, 2024

After pushing my Presonus 16.0.2 to the absolute max for over a year, it was finally time to upgrade.

I first build a custom table for the mixer with some pre-fab legs and a solid piece of birch butcher block finished with water-based poly.

The varnish had about a week to cure before the mixer arrived, which thankfully is sufficient for water-based poly.

Then the mixer arrived. A Presonus StudioLive Series III 64s. I learned how to weld this summer, so I designed an “open doghouse” for the back of the table to hang cable strain-reliefs from.

The mixer also doubles as a 64×64 channel audio interface and has very low latency, which has worked great so far for not just recording initial live takes, but also tracking overdubs.

My welding table made it pretty quick and easy to lay things out and tack them in place.

I found that alternating tacking inside and outside worked best to avoid the welds pulling the material out of shape.

Then I went back over and welded all the seams and ground them smooth.

The tubing is 1-1/4″ 18 Gauge steel, which is thinner than I had worked with before.

The cross bar is solid steel, which I calculated could handle the weight of the cables without any noticeable deflection.

I could have bought plastic tube caps, but it was pretty easy to cap the tube myself and looks much better.

Once installed, the snakes can now hang from the bar instead of the mixer.

The master output runs though the audio tie-lines in the building to the machine room to feed the video server for livestreams and video recording.

I now have plenty of channels and can finally have stereo headphone mixes.

This new board has 32 analog inputs, 16 analog outputs and twice that many mixing channels internally so it can be expanded in the future to double the capacity.

Workshop Cleanup
Sofa Table