Is it time to upgrade your Sound Devices MixPre audio recorder for a video production? Let's let's check. I have myself fallen into traps over time. Let's first check to make sure that none of us are experiencing these traps. Here are some common excuses people use to try and justify equipment upgrades that may or may not be necessary. Number one, I want better audio quality. For recording dialogue audio, spoken word audio, uh for the same amount of money or less,

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find something better than the Sound Devices MixPre 2 or even original.

So, I think what's in most cases people that think they're going to buy their way into better sound quality with something that costs more than a Sound

Devices MixPre are probably not going to experience that. And you're probably If you are experiencing audio quality issues, it's probably going to be something else in your signal chain or your technique. That's number one. Number two, MixPres are old. The MixPre 2 series, I believe, were announced and started shipping in 2019. It's now 2026, almost 7 years, 6 and 1/2 7 years later.

And there must be something better, and there must be newer recorders that are better. Uh someone named to me below one that's better, and maybe for certain circumstances there's something that's better, but I would be hard-pressed to figure out what that is.

Next one, we've I've outgrown my current recorder setup. Maybe, that's possible, but consider this. What are you going to upgrade to? And what is going to solve those particular problems that you're trying to solve that a Sound Devices

MixPre won't? And there are some legitimate cases there, incidentally, but just feeling like having this vague sense of oh, I've outgrown it, not good enough. Next, bored of upgrading all my other other camera equipment, and everything is really good there, so now I just feel like I should upgrade my audio recorder. Nothing Not everything has to be brand new to be great. I think a lot of us just need to focus on our craft and this is another case.

Money is burning a hole in your pocket is another one. If you're in that situation, congratulations. It's great that you have enough spare money to even consider something else, but that alone is not a good enough reason. I think those are in and of themselves, if that's if you know, there's a lot of context around these decisions, but if you're experiencing one of those, caution. Be careful. Now, there are legitimate reasons for upgrading. I would say though, what you upgrade to from a MixPre and we're recording this one with a Sound Devices

MixPre 3 incidentally, it's a big upgrade in most cases for a field recorder again in the context of recording dialogue audio in and having a field recorder format.

In audio interfaces, you can get really good quality for less money than this, but this is portable and it can be battery powered from the field and you don't need a computer, so on and so forth. And there can be legitimate reasons for upgrading. If you're starting to do production sound for commercial work or even for narrative work, maybe especially for narrative work that you're getting paid for, that's where it may be time to upgrade from something like a MixPre 3. So, when you get into a situation where you need to feed balanced audio out to other systems, maybe to a camera, maybe to a wireless system, to other things like that and you need great flexibility. You need more route-ability. You need to be able to have flexibility in what goes to the one wireless feed and what goes to a different wireless feed.

Those kind of things, you might need digital inputs, you might need digital outputs, you might need, you know, a whole variety of things. Those are legitimate reasons to upgrade and in those cases, you're going to have to spend some serious money to get there. So,

I just want to say here kind of review really quickly. Is the MixPre perfect? No, it's not perfect. I am a fan, but it's not perfect and I recognize that it's not perfect, but it does have several things going for it. It's preamp quality is good.

It has plenty of gain for almost any microphone you can imagine.

The menus, in my opinion is opinion, pretty easy to use. Once you learn them, pretty intuitive. You can switch between simple and advanced modes depending on your needs. That's a pretty cool feature. It has 32-bit float. You can use 24-bit, also.

So, it really has what most people that are recording corporate video or, you know, running very small production companies, those kind of things, has everything that most of us need. Podcasters, it has an auto mix feature or plugin you can add. So, unless you truly need something beyond what the MixPre can provide for your use case, it's a really good recorder and there's very few legitimate reasons to upgrade from it. So, that's the first part. We have a second part, another video. Check the link down below and I'm going to talk to Sound Devices and give them my wish list for what I'd like to see in a next generation MixPre.

Get out there and make some great sound in the meantime. >> [music]