Brief History:
Enter the WMD Performance Mixer MKII - Nine years after the MKI was released, the MKII builds on all the valuable feedback we've received. This is a serious upgrade, with feature enhancements and engineering improvements affecting every bit of the design.
The original Performance Mixer changed the eurorack landscape when it first came out, it made mixing much more intuitive and instant, it allowed people to ditch the heavy outboard mixer, and keep their system patched while they traveled. It made using individual drum modules and multiple voices easy to keep straight in a packed dark room. We know this because you all wrote us with praise, and with suggestions to make it better. Almost all of those suggestions have been engineered and are in the new unit, plus a few features that push the concept further.
Thank you for your support, trust, and patience for us to deliver this newly designed mixer. It's the most advanced and complicated thing I've ever designed, and it's taken several years to get ready for the world to see.
Decisions, decisions, decisions!
If you recall, we showed a previous version of the PM MKII a year ago. That version was very similar to the original, with a few enhancements. Primarily focused on manufacturability and overall noise floor with some great recording features. We moved to an 8 layer board, replaceable channel strips, developed the MIDI and bootloader, pre/post fader headers, and made it work on both AUXs simultaneously.
I sat on that design for a while after showing it. That version (Rev E) was done and could've been sent to production, but I didn't feel good about it. The improvements made it more expensive, but the feature set wasn't there, but it was really fun to play on, and worked well, but it was missing the big leaps that would justify the cost increase. So I went back to the drawing macbook and redesigned and drew up ideas until I landed with this mixer, (Rev G) that went to prototype after a year of revision. Here's riffing on a few of the improvements that make the final MKII worth making.
- Noise Performance - The MKI was alright with noise, there was a little bleed too. Going to 8 layer boards meant I could put ground planes between trace layers, and spread the traces out triple the spacing of what they were on the MKI, this reduces bleed/crosstalk by a factor of about six.
- Noise Performance 2 - On the Original, the Level VCA was before the Panning VCAs, which saved on parts/power, but it meant that the Panning VCAs were always connected to the mix bus, adding noise floor that couldn't be attenuated. Making all the channels stereo and putting the Pan circuit first eliminated this problem, now the noise add is controlled by the fader. This did force me to make every channel stereo, so the design got simpler through figuring this out.
- Panning / Crossfader - The above panning/level improvement made it possible to convert the Pan control into a crossfader, buy simply routing the post pan signals through a switch to the opposing channel, summed at the Level control. This huge improvement allowed the A/&/B input switching scheme to still work on the PM MKII, a bit differently, but its there in spirit.
- Modular Design - The channel strips are all now stereo, and identical, which makes assembly much easier, and lowers the cost. It also makes replacing them easier should a mechanical part fail or get spilled into. Further, the Patchbay, Power board, and Master section are all separate parts, so if there's a failure, they can be quickly swapped without having to RMA the whole unit.
- Patchbay - The MKI and rev E MKII still had jacks misaligned with channels. This was a source of frustration for myself and many users of the PM MKI. And I decided to just be done with it. It didn't make sense to try to put jacks over the channel, it wasted too much space on the panel... So all the jacks go left, keeping the mixer clear of cables, this let me space the knobs out a bit to take up all 3U. It's cleaner, simpler to make, and intuitive to use.
- Expandability - It's super modular now, the DB25 can connect to any two headers that spits out audio, they're all the same format across PM MKII and Channels MKII. Pre, post, mixes, connect it however you want. And the connectors can't be hooked to power, meaning no more blown opamps and RMAs to the factory. They're all shrouded too so they won't get bent in shipping!
