Formula Sound FF2.2L How to Turn on a Pro High End Mixer

0:00 Turn on a professional mixer

It may seem pure logic to you, but sometimes something that stares you in the face, you completely ignore until you suffer the consequences. Now in this video I'm going to show you how to turn on a professional mixer. Now these aren't the sort of mixers that you buy locally for, you know, a couple of hundred pounds. These are the mixers that you would spend a great deal of money on and also highly likely they have been handmade. Now this here is from Formula Sound in conjunction with Function One. This is the FF 2.2L. This is a hand-built two-channel mixer. Okay, so it's a big chunk. It's exceedingly good quality and there is a lot more to this than meets the eye. But how do we turn it on? Okay, the FF 2.2L will come with its own separate power supply.

Now you need to make sure, of course, that you are plugged in. The mixer itself has a cable attached to it, so the cable will attach to the power supply and then the power supply in turn needs to be plugged in to your regular kettle lead plugged in at the mains. On the power supply is the on-off switch, so you need to make sure that's off before you even plug anything in. If you plug the power in... to the power supply with it being on, then you're going to have a signal coming straight in. I'm not saying there could be issues, but let's just stick to protocol here. Make sure power supply is off, plug in and then of course you can turn on. Before though, you need to make sure, and this is the important part on your mixer, that the two volume controls are down.

1:51 Regular clock

Also, the trim controls are set to the off position. Now, if you're not familiar with the off position with dials like this, very simple, look at a regular clock. If the dials are turned to the seven o'clock position, then that means they will be indeed off. If they're at the five o'clock position, then they're full on, so you do not want that. So I have got both of my trims set to the off position, seven o'clock. I've also got my master... I shouldn't have said vaster then. My master volume set to the seven o'clock position and my booth. The two up faders are all the way down. All right, so now I can turn the power supply on. So why have I done all of that? Why have I got the trim down and the up faders down and so on?

Well, let's imagine you've just done a wicked set. You turn it off, you walk away and you turn your speakers on, you turn your decks on, you plug it in. All of a sudden you may get that nasty click sound through your PA. Now, that's not good because you can start to damage and hurt your sound system. So it's always advisable to make sure everything is off here first before turning the power on, which means in turn, if you do happen to have your speaker system on, you're not going to get that nasty click once everything's on. Then of course, you can start to turn your trims up. Now again, the trims are there for one reason only, to make sure that the audio level is turned on. The audio level on both sides is equal.

3:37 You will adjust the trim accordingly so the LEDs match up

So for example, on the right hand side you may have a vinyl turntable. On the left hand side you may have a CD, even though it could be the same track. The audio signal from the CD player may be slightly higher or lower than the audio signal from your vinyl turntable. So you will adjust the trim accordingly so the LEDs match up. You don't want the right hand side going, say, at plus three and the left hand side going in at minus one, because then when you turn your master volume up, the one side will seem higher than the other one. So set your trims, then you can start to maybe play a track, bring your faders up all the way to the top. But you'll notice I have not yet turned the master volume up very simply because I can now turn it up

And I can get the signal, the audio sound I want through my speaker, knowing full well that when I bring the volumes down on the up faders and bring them back up again, it's not going to get any higher because I've set the level on the master volume control. Also your booth control as well. Make sure that is down at the off position, which is seven o'clock by all means then turn your booth system on. Maybe if you've got powered speakers, turn them to the zero dB. Position, which generally is 12 o'clock and then you can start to turn your booth up. So a lot of this is pure logic. It's trial and error, but I hope this helps once again. Thank you very much to formula sound. This is the FF 2.2 L practice and enjoy.

Thank you.

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