Mechen V06 (Review)

 I bought a handheld recorder . At the time i meant to buy the Xvive Portable but later i discovered thru reviews that it has a 3.5mm stereo line in ,and further more some reviews about Zoom H1n describe recording via line in as troublesome that needs lot of attenuation . So i couldn't afford a more pricey recorder and just noticed this recorder at Ali Express - Mechen V06 . Now at Ali Express there are maybe 100 types of handheld recorders ,many advertise crazy resolution but no brand at all ,so i dug a little deeper about this one once i noticed there is actually a real company with line of products . Thanks to a review over at You Tube ,and it is a single one review on this machine i gambled so i bought it .

First i did was using a wrong output from my mixer so my recordings were lacking the effects . Next i had the Noise Reduction at 1 ,there is a scale from 1 to 7 i think ..when it comes to Noise Reduction ,but there is also Noise Reduction off - Thank God ! 

..and it records well . The specs somewhere describe some odd kbs resolution of the recordings , i used the highest bitrate and Sound Forge says it is 16bit 96kHz ,unlike 24bit it advertises.. I never cared about that difference , i grew up with cassettes and making music on Amiga ,so 16 bits and 96kHz is more then enough for me ! 

Thru out these 5-6 recordings i did these past few days i used a Studiomaster mixer to record on to the Mechen  ,the faders are at 2-3 and feeding well this little thing while the gain settings on the Mechen are at 2 ,so you would need some attenuation to record sound from mixer .The recordings are not too loud which is expected and it needs some leveling afterwards ,with these settings the waveform is peak to peak on Sound Forge, but one thing i noticed is that Resampling the recording to 48kHz helps a lot to sort of clean up the waveform . The rest is little bit Soft Limiting and you have a descent WAV recording twice cheaper .

This portable recorder really looks nice with metal housing and a big screen .It is not advertised as studio tool ,and having only one 3.5mm socket that switches internally from being line in and line out can be annoying to some maybe ,but for me it's very easy to just copy the recordings onto my computer .It has 144Gb memory and it will auto shut down when not in use .Really happy with the quality of recordings , it's a winner! It holds well after using it extensively for over a month and making over 50 recordings .

This is recorded with Mechen V06

Studiomaster SESSIONMIX822

 

I rarely buy gear , so rare that nowadays i write the companies like Studiomaster ,Xvive ,and whoever before i buy something .So the people at Studiomaster after answering my query said that i can review this piece of gear . I bought it myself and here's what i think about it .

I am not audio engineer so i really can not speak all in dB and Hertz but i can give honest view and ear on the machine , i did go to SAE for a few months but i never graduated so i know nothing ... 

One thing that led me to this mixer for start is that Mic and Line inputs were separate for each channel, that was very important for me ,and something i prefer .and two aux channels unlike all the mixers in that price range that usually offer just one.

There are compressors on all 6 channels and I would like to test the compressors with premixed inputs and various sources  ,they really are a attractive feature and at first glance they sounded more like sound leveler than true compression until i pushed them all the way and there it was, a nice interaction . 

 I know the mixer is sort of a utility box for many ,and it will be set and forget but i like to treat it like an instrument and it's very good for that . One fantastic feature this mixer has is not only the great effects and the dedicated fader for the DSP but also the ability to turn off and on the Effects ,like an Effects mute . 

When it comes to the EQ's they are sort of very vanilla , they are just 3 band EQ's without sweep and gain controls separate which i loved with my old Fostex DMT8 , so for the price you can't ask for more . External EQ is needed if you want real thump or squeak but they do the job nicely for commoners .

 I still like the mixer .Actually it's layout is just what i would like or imagine !

It has mute on each channel which is important for live sessions , and the submix* is more than welcome for no input mixing as a 3rd aux channel , yes there are 2 x aux channels which is important if you wanna use external effects and stuff and more important if you wanna record some no input mixing experimental mambo jumbo . The onboard effects have dedicated pot per channel next to the aux 1 and aux 2 and sound beautiful ,i will only say that and it's nice that there is a proper effects processor included for the price , i can imagine it being very useful feature in Live Events situations , like amateur Theater or Poetry reading.

With the compressors and the additional gain preamps on the top of the mixer this thing has a lot of gain at least for me using synthesizer levels i never touch the preamps at all . 

Sadly there is no separate return channels for the 2 auxiliary outputs but a single stereo return and whatever that is is not talking well with my Polymoog Resonators which tells me i might need to adapt a cable for normal use . (There really is a User Manual:)

Lastly there is an mp3 player there , i wish it was just some picture of Phil Collins, i could live with that , you can just ignore the whole mp3 module , unless you are at a live event like a gallery or some book publishing event or everywhere else where you'd need music before and after some strange lady reads her semi erotic poem with a big white hat with purple ribbon

You have Group 1+2 as a linked stereo bus (Group 1 = L, Group 2 = R)

Each channel has a routing switch that sends signal to both groups at once

Then you get fader control over Group 1/2 output level ,So functionally, it’s less like:

“true independent subgroup routing”  and more like: “alternate stereo mix bus with per-channel assign”

But i can imagine those two outputs being properly abused in no mixing input session .You can also have alternate mix going thru a processor and then feeding it back to another channel or recorder , and then you can give to two people two variants of the recording. I ended up using the Group output exactly for recording sessions , with faders at 20/30 or just very little it works well feeding a semi-professional handheld recorder .

Conclusion. Yes, for me it is worth every penny. Companies keep cutting corners and features at this price point, yet this thing still manages to pack quite a lot inside. you get a lot of features that some might find useful , some less , but it's really worth as base for a small budget studio . It's cheap ... and you won't get much more for the price , after months of use one thing i would complain about it the noisy mute switches ,it's very annoying and you can't fix it later in recordings ,i guess i just got what i paid for .

I hope to update this article in the future with few no-input mixing recordings .

https://studiomaster.com