I was looking into whether or not I had enough skills to pull off making a simple mixer (the answer is no, btw) and I found people either were making “buffered” or “unbuffered” mixers. Can someone please explain what this means? Which one is better to use for a mixer? What are the pros/cons to one over the other?
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Some utilities like multiples and mixers can be built using a very simple passive circuit, where by passive I mean using components that don’t require power such as resistors and capacitors. The price of this simplicity is that the behavior of the circuit can be altered by what you plug it into. For example an unbuffered multiple is just an input jack wired to several output jacks, but depending on what you plug it into, a 1 V/oct control voltage plugged into it may become less than 1V/oct at its outputs.
A buffered circuit uses active components, like transistors or op amps, to isolate each output from the rest of the circuit. It’s a more complicated circuit but it performs better under some circumstances.
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I was just looking into buffered vs non buffered multies last night. Main thing is the opamps give consistent current so you dont get problems of weedly little output.
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