Mindprint Trio
5 October 2005
Mindprint isn’t the first company that springs to mind when one considers studio control centres, but its Trio devices may change that. Designed more with the domestic market in mind the Mindprint Trio gives control over monitoring volume, speaker choice, headphone levels and throws a couple of preamps into the deal. Designed to sit on your desk, the Trio takes up a minimal amount of space and saves you reaching toward a rack just to organise a quick recording. Very much like a master section from a console, the Trio provides three sets of speaker choices, a mono and dim button as well as separate volume control over two sets of headphones. A larger master volume control knob is situated on the bottom right of the unit so you can quickly grab it when some fool points a microphone straight into your nearfields. Unlike similar products such as the Mackie Big Knob and the Presonus Central Station, the Trio includes a microphone preamp section that includes high and low EQ control along with an interesting ‘FAT’ control and a low cut filter. The mic pre section includes 48V phantom power for condenser mics. The line input section includes high and low equalisation to boot.
LED metering for input or output sits bang in the middle of the unit surrounded by the Mindprint ‘brain’ labyrinth design. To the rear of the Trio are your headphone outputs, and insert points for the mic pre as ¼-inch jacks. A single set of monitor outputs appear as ¼-inch jacks with the remaining two monitor outs presented as RCA plugs. Staying on the RCA tip is I/O for your DAW or audio card. None of the inputs or outputs are balanced apart from the XLR microphone input. For pristine connection to your computer-based recorder the Trio offers an optical S/PDIF I/O that will accept sample rates of up to 96k. The unit can operate as either master or slave digitally. The Trio seems well suited to recordists looking for a system to consolidate their voiceover recordings and would make a reasonably good partner for the optical port on your G5. Steven Somerhill
Price: $899
CMI: (03) 9315 2244 or www.cmi.com.au
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