I think by now, people would have agreed that I am shamelessly promoting my Yamaha Stagepas 500 portable PA system to the skies. And it comes as no wonder because I find that this system is one of the the best out there. Today, I will show a close-up of what the mixer component is.
This little baby, which fits into the back of one of the speakers, is actually a powered mixer, dishing out 250 watts per channel. Not bad for a small little mixer too! On the top left-hand corner, you can see two jack sockets, which are meant for 1/4″ phono jacks. These are meant for powering the speakers. On the right of the speaker output jacks, there is a tape out and a monitor out. The monitor out is a very useful feature for connecting to external sound sources, like say, some external powered speakers or to an amplifier/speaker combination.
The button on the lower left (SPEECH/MUSIC) is pretty interesting. When toggled, it activates some pre-configured equalizers within the circuitry that optimises the system for speech or music respectively. If you are using the system for say a road-show, and will be talking a lot on a microphone, you would do well to set it to speech. If you were using it for music, like for say, an acoustic gig, you would set it to music. For me, I always set it to to music, even when I am speking on the mic as well. That is because I can set the equalization on the individual channels.
There is also a phantom power switch. That is right. You now can hook up your condenser microphones or active DI boxes and the phantom power will take care of it for you. There is also basic reverb but it is global, not limited to channels. There is no AUX function but then again, this is a small mixer board. You need to be running a bigger, more featured mixing board for such things. For portable PA, this is more than sufficient.
The Yamaha Stagepas. I like it and I own it. You should get one too!
