Suggestions for solving my seemingly impossible setup problem?

[Keith_W]

Let me see if I can understand you properly. You want to mix three different sources at the same time: game, music, and microphone, and listen to all of them simultaneously. I have a suggestion for you:

- Get an optical switcher. Use this to switch between various game devices like Xbox, PS2, PS4, etc. because you're not going to be playing all of them at the same time, right? Plug all your sources into it, and plug the output into the input of your mixer.
- Consider an optical to SPDIF converter, in case you want to mix in a second source, e.g. playback device.
- Get a mixer which has microphone input, optical input, and SPDIF input. The cheapest one I can think of is the Focusrite Clarett 4pre, but that costs US$560. There may be even cheaper ones around. As others have said, mixers are not cheap.

If you only need to mix optical with microphone, it becomes cheaper. You could consider the Focusrite Clarett 2pre which has a single optical input and a microphone input for $399. Both the Focusrites have headphone output or line outputs. They are not fantastic quality, but you get what you pay for.

Sadly, your budget is not realistic. I can not think of any mixer that sells for less than $100 unless you get very lucky in the secondhand market.

 

[Blumlein 88]

What product do they have that would be useful here? I don’t see any?

Even a second hand digital mixer isn’t going to be easy, since even those usually have no more than 1 or 2 SPDIF inputs.

What you can do however is staggered your setup. All HDMI sources you won’t use I parallel. A simple HDMI switch with SPDIF or analog out will help. The you only need a few channel mixer, which may even be analog. That should be feasible within the budget if you go 2nd hand.

Well I'm not sure any of the Mutecs would work altogether how is needed in this case. Then again, I'm wondering how all this works for someone, but I'll take their word for it that it does.

I think of all those tests about multi-tasking. Those who do it more do it less well. No one truly multi-tasks, but just switch between tasks rapidly. So I don't think I want all these inputs mixing audio from what sounds like often 3 sources at once. My advice actually would be, don't do that.

 

[DoublesAdvocate]

That's one hell of an operation you have going on there

But you don't really need all of those devices playing audio at the same time, right? How many of them do you want to combine? If you have 3 HDMI devices on one screen, you don't want all their audio, do you?

Indeed I do.
The most frequent situation I find myself in is some combination of 2 different devices both being active at once with the 3 active devices being less common.
A large part of why I ended up at the 'some sort of mixer' solution is just simply the volume control. I hate fiddling with volume settings on PC, and the volume level from the game consoles especially varies SIGNIFICANTLY from game to game. The PS2, 360, and bluray player also all have no system level volume control and the in game settings for mixing audio levels is usually awful as well.

Sadly, your budget is not realistic. I can not think of any mixer that sells for less than $100 unless you get very lucky in the secondhand market.

That part was mostly just a joke lol, I knew I'd never be within that range just due to how much equipment I needed.

I think of all those tests about multi-tasking. Those who do it more do it less well. No one truly multi-tasks, but just switch between tasks rapidly. So I don't think I want all these inputs mixing audio from what sounds like often 3 sources at once. My advice actually would be, don't do that.

This would be pretty accurate yes, it's less multitasking and more often an 'idle' task with sound cues being done in the background while I do something else in the foreground.
eg. A game on the PS2 which I've muted, talking to a friend on PC about something I see in that game, all the while having music playing at a reduced volume from the phone which is where I keep my music library since I frequently switch between the multiple computers and obviously don't want to duplicate the entire music database on each device.

 

[d3miller]

I had a similar requirement. The whole thing I wanted to solve for was allowing my wife and kids to listen to either our turntable or streaming music (via Wiim), without having to switching inputs. Speakers are Genelec G Four, and they would be a long-ish run, so I'm using XLR cables. I couldn't find a preamp that suited all my needs (if there is one, please tell me). So I went with an Allen & Heath Zed-6FX mixer. Bonus is I can plug-in a microphone for karaoke w/Apple Music (via Apple TV Airplaying to the Wiim). And down the road, even an electric guitar or digital piano (kids are starting to take music lessons).

But the sources are really complex...
For the turntable, I've got my Project Debut Carbon EVO going into an iFi Zen Phono, to a MiniDSP 2x4 (for Dirac), then into a Schitt SYS for volume control, then into the mixer. I know I could simply use the mixer for volume control on this source, but if my kids or wife had too look at the mixer, no dice... The SYS is 1 simple knob, and they know that is what controls the TT.

For streaming I've got my Wiim with optical out to a Martin Logan Unison (for ARC room correction), then optical out to a Topping D30Pro, with XLR out to TRS into the mixer. The D30Pro also has a volume knob, so again, easy to control volume. This knob for TT, that knob for streaming...

Ideally this could be all handled with a single room correction solution and a single preamp (no mixer). But I searched hard, and couldn't find anything that was reasonable.

The only other option that could significantly simplify it is running both RCA and XLR to the Genelecs, because the Genelec itself has a mixer built in for the two inputs (confirmed by Genelec themselves as a "summing amplifier" via email to support), but with the two inputs there was a lot of noise/buzz (more than with the mixer), and I didn't want to run 2 sets of cables ~25'. I actually had it running like this for a brief time when everything was close together, but I'm moving the speakers to a wall-mounted location.

I'm 100% convinced that if Amir were to measure this setup, it would not measure well... But, it still sounds good, it solves all my simplicity problems, and it f'ing bumps! I can't hear any of the noise/hiss unless I'm 3" from the speaker. The Genelecs are simply amazing. Somehow getting flat down to ~34Hz (measured via REW+UMIK-1) even though their specs say down to 48Hz +/- 2.5dB.