 Hey what's up guys, welcome to our trending reviews. So if you come across this video then you're probably aware of what the Mixpre 3 is. If you're not, just a quick explanation, it's a pre-amplifier. What that means is basically it's a sound recorder for your external devices, primarily your external microphones used for your DSLR cameras and so on. So there's many purposes on why someone would buy this, but ultimately is to get some really high quality film studio type quality audio and if you're a YouTuber like myself you want to get better at your audio game then this is one of the best ways to do it. Now this device, you're probably aware of it, you've probably done your research, it is quite expensive, it's about £600, it's not that cheap but ultimately what it can do is definitely worth the money and I'm going to be showing you some of the sound footage in a bit. Now just a quick overview of this Mixpre 3 by Sound Devices and what it actually comes with. Now on the front you have three dials, these are basically your channels that come on the Mixpre 3. If you get the Mixpre 6, you've got five channels, this one has three channels on there and what I mean by channels are basically audio tracks that you can record to, so if you're going to be interviewing someone and each of you have a microphone then you might use two channels, record to the same device. If you're a music band and you have three people you can record each of you into three separate tracks on here for your audio as well. Now just to give you an explanation about the ports on this device, starting off with the front you have the play button, the stop button and a record button to play back all of your audio. You have the three different dials for each of the channels and the tracks that come onto the device and if you're going to be like myself, you're going to be using this for your YouTube videos, just you on your own and one microphone, you're only going to be using one track. Now I've looked online and there's various different YouTube videos around the Mixpre 3 but I haven't found any that actually explained how to set it up with a shotgun microphone, explaining each of the ports and just basic overview of how to get up and running straight away. So hopefully that's what I'm going to be trying to show you guys with and hopefully you find that useful. Now on the left-hand side of the device you'll find that there's a couple of XLR inputs, I'll explain what those are in a little bit. You also have your stereo out input here, so a 3.5mm jack so you can play back the audio into maybe your headphones or a separate speaker and so on, just to see how the audio is coming out and you can play about with it there. It's a lot easier to do that rather than transferring everything that you've recorded from your internal SD card in here and play back on a computer and so on and you'll be running backwards and forwards to do that so it's a bit of a hassle I'll avoid doing that. You also have a USB type C port which you can also use to power the device or transfer all of your audiophiles onto your laptop. Now you also have a power button here to turn the device on and off. Now in the back you have the SD card slot and you also have an Allen key. That basically allows you to mount your camera on top of the Mixpre 3 by sticking the Allen key through the bottom hole there and it pushes up the screw that it pops up and it stays there and you put your camera inside there and you twist the Allen key at the bottom which is pretty useful. On the right hand side you have a headphone port, you have your auxiliary in for various different microphones, you have another XLR input, you also have a dial here to twist and change some of the settings on the main menu that I'll be showing you with and you also have a timecode input here as well to allow you to sync your audio to your videos by using a compatible cable and a compatible camera to actually input the timestamp and the date stamp of your recording of your videos to match the audio as well. That way it's easier for you to sync your audio track to your video track using maybe Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere and so on. The other thing I wanted to mention is how to power this on. Now there's four different ways you can power this device. The first one is using four AA batteries. This comes with an adapter to put the batteries in inside the box. I haven't put that in there yet. The second way is to use rechargeable L-mount batteries. They are basically the same as the Sony A-Series camera batteries. You can use them as well. The third way is you can put in the USB-C into the USB-C port and that can be powered by your laptop and finally you can use a power adapter into your wall socket which is also powered by USB-C which is what I will be using today. Just to let you know this doesn't come with any of the power source options that I've mentioned so you have to buy them separately which is a bit of a shame. But I bought the power adapter that will go into my wall socket. This is USB-C and I'll plug this in and I'll be able to power it on. That way I don't have to keep recharging batteries and so on and I can just keep it plugged into the wall at any time. Right, so this is plugged in. Everything is ready to go. So now I'm going to be turning this on and going through some of the main menu options on this touchscreen. Just to let you know the touchscreen is very sensitive. I really like it. It's kind of like an iPhone screen as well. It's not very hard to press. It's very easy to use. It's simple and it's one of the best touch screens on these pre-amplifiers that I've come across in the past. So let's have a look. I'm going to turn it on from the side by using the on switch. You'll see that it will power on. There's a light that comes on there. And you can see that it's loading. And now we're ready to take a look at how we can use this. Now just to let you know, I will be using my Sennheiser MKE600 shotgun microphone with this. At the moment it's connected directly through the mic input into my Panasonic G80. I've got it up on a microphone stand here. Now this is the audio I'm using at the moment to give you a tutorial, but I will be showing you the audio that you get from using it directly from the pre-amplifier. And I will be syncing that to the video in post editing. So just be aware of that. Right. So the first screen you'll see is the screen here, which actually shows you your inputs for your left and right tracks on the pre-amplifier. Now the first thing I want to show you is if you go into the menu, you have the breadcrumbs here underneath the menu. So that shows you that there's three pages. So if you tap that, you'll go on to the second page. Tap that again, you'll go into the third page. Now what I'm going to do is first I'm going to go into system on the second page here. Click on that and it comes up with different options here. Now mode is the one I want to draw your attention to. So if you click on mode, you have three different types of mode. Basic, advanced and custom. Now basic mode is going to be mainly for the majority of people. It just gives you the minimum options to actually get you up and running. If you're not very familiar with audio technology in general and you've never used pre-amplifiers before, I'd recommend you stick to basic. Advanced gives you a bit more options to play around with the gain, the fade and various different other track options to enhance your audio. But generally the basic mode that I've played around with actually will cover all of that. So I'm going to leave it on basic for this tutorial. So let's leave that there and it gives you a couple of other options as well on the system to actually connect your Mixpre 3 to your phone. For example, if you want to control this wirelessly through Bluetooth, you can get the wingman app on the Play Store or the iOS store. You can adjust the brightness, the date and time on this device, update the firmware, have a look at the version and so on. So there's a lot of system settings you should have a look at. So I would start off by making sure that you're in basic mode. Now if I go back to the first menu preset, this is something that you can download online from the Sound Devices website and look for your compatible camera in the list to see if there's a preset setting file. It's an XML file that you can download and transfer onto the device and it will change all the settings for you based on your camera. But I will leave that for now. You can save a project. So any settings that you mess around with, you can save it to a project file and you can use that project as you go along in your upcoming videos and you want to do more recordings and so on. Inputs, this is where you'll be setting in all of your settings for your microphone that go into the Mix 3.3. I don't have the microphone connected to this yet but I'm going to be doing that right now and I'll be showing you the various different inputs. So I'll be switching to my internal microphone on my Panasonic G80 so the audio may change slightly. Right, so I'm going to connect my Sennheiser microphone here to the Mix 3.3. Just to let you know the microphone does require phantom power. What phantom power means is basically it gets external power from a preamplifier and it powers a shotgun microphone. To do that I need to buy this male to female XLR cable. It doesn't come with the Sennheiser mic so I need to do that first separately. So I connect that and the other end of the XLR cable I'll put that into channel one on this preamp. Right now that that's in channel one I've got the microphone set up there. Now to get into the microphone input settings I basically have to press on the channel one knob here so you push it in and it'll bring up track one settings. Now by default the pan is basically set to L which means left. Now what you need to do is cycle through and select center. So this will allow the track to be recorded on both tracks the left and the right so you don't have audio just on one side. So when you do play it back you'll you'll notice that if it's on L the sound will only be playing on the left side of the speakers so center will play everything like a surround sound. Now phantom that is set to 48 volts that basically is used to power on the shotgun microphone so I would set that on and the green light comes on on my shotgun mic to show that it's powered. I don't need to use a AA battery when I'm using phantom power. Now low cut I can leave that off but you can play around with that to see how your audio turns out when you're using it. Input you can either as microphone. The other thing is when you're selecting one of these you can cycle through with the arrows hit left right center and so on but on the right hand side you have an knob that that cycles through various different selections in the menu. So those are the only the basic options in that mix pre three. Now if you tap on the home screen you get to see the left and right audio come in through straight away so what at the moment is there's no green bars going to show that there's no audio being picked up. There's LED lights around each of the knobs as well to show you that there's actually some audio input going into the device but at the moment there's nothing. So what I need to do is turn up the channel one gain here and you can see it's starting to pick up my audio. Now the green one it shouldn't really go into the red which means it's too loud you can maybe turn it down. Now I like this as well because it gives you an indication whilst you're recording that if you're you're too loud or you're too light in your audio too soft it gives you an indication via the light and the the markers here. So I would keep it around 20 decibels anything higher than that will go into the yellow zone which is probably pushing a little bit into the boundaries but at the moment this seems to be doing a good enough job. So what I'm going to do now is basically record my video ongoing using the pre amplifier set on basic set to about 20 decibels here and sync that with my audio coming from the camera in the video. So let me know what you guys think on that. The other thing I wanted to mention is if you wanted to see how your audio is coming up put your headphones into the stereo output port here on the left hand side stick your 3.5 millimeter jack cable into there listen in your headphones by playback and see how it sounds. So having said that let's go ahead and see how the audio sounds in comparison to the shotgun microphone being played directly into the SLR camera. Okay guys this is an audio test with the internal microphone on my Panasonic G80 DSLR. This is an audio test using the Sennheiser microphone using the AA battery going straight into my DSLR camera. Okay guys this is the audio test coming from the Mixpre 3 with my Sennheiser MKE600 shotgun microphone. Big difference right? All right guys so thanks for watching I hope that was really useful for you. So if you did like the audio difference with the Mixpre 3 and the Sennheiser mic then give this video a big thumbs up. If you have any comments then please do ask them down below otherwise check out my Instagram at trending reviews it's easier for you to ask questions there and for me to keep track of them and I will get back to you a lot quicker on my Instagram. Other than that if you're thinking about getting the Mixpre 3 let me know what you guys think of this video if you think the audio is definitely worth paying the price for this and if you do want to see more of the advanced mode features and how to set up the timecode mode with the DSLR cameras then make sure you subscribe I'm going to be bringing out those videos very soon. Until next time guys thanks for watching I'll see you then.