Sound Devices MixPre 6M

Putting their Kashmir microphone preamp technology in a more musician-friendly package, the Sound Devices M-Series MixPre-6M is a multi-channel recorder and USB interface. It's designed to be a studio-grade, portable solution for musicians and singer/songwriters. You can use it to capture stray moments of inspiration, or medium-sized rehearsals and live performances. 

The M-Series is geared towards the musician with its touch-screen interface, allowing you to quickly get vocal melodies, instrumental hooks, and rhythms down. Use the built-in reverb and vocal air effects allow you to add character to the sound of instruments and vocals. The bounce feature can be used to free up tracks to allow the layering of more instruments or for rendering in effects. After laying and overdubbing tracks, musicians can mix their song using dedicated knobs to control levels, pans, solos, and mutes, allowing you to create a mix without hooking the device up to a computer. Render recordings for uploading to website/social media, sharing with band members or exporting to a DAW for further production.

The interface provides 4 combination XLR-1/4" inputs, as well as a 3.5mm stereo input that's suitable for use with plug-in-power microphones or stereo line sources. 3.5mm jacks are on hand for both unbalanced and headphone outputs. Comprehensive metering is made possible by an easily-readable LCD screen and LED backlit buttons. With card slots for SD, SDHC, or SDXC, you'll have plenty of space to record straight to the device—or to load/save user setups (as this is a digital mixer with a digital patch bay to boot, you can route sound through it in all sorts of ways).

Vocal Air and Reverb effects are offered, as are polarity, gain, pan, and fader controls. 48V phantom power is built-in for your condenser microphones, and a variable low-cut is provided to round off lows from 40 to 160 Hz. With analog input limiters and digital output limiters, you can minimize clipping distortion.

The unit sports a die-cast aluminum chassis with a 1/4"-20 thread for mounting. You can power this unit via the included MX-4AA battery sled (which accepts 4 AA batteries), or with the included MX-PSU, which connects to the unit via USB-C.