In this video Shaun Whynacht gives a personal tour of his home office setup—including a motorized IKEA standing desk, MacBook Pro, dual monitors, and natural lighting—before introducing the Art USB Mix 4, a compact USB audio mixer he purchased for around CAD $109. He explains why the built‑in laptop microphone isn’t sufficient for high‑quality recordings, outlines the mixer’s key features (single‑channel phantom‑powered mic input, optional second mic, headphone jack, MP3 input, loopback, main outs, USB‑powered operation), and demonstrates how it integrates with his MacBook Pro for podcasting, Zoom calls, and on‑the‑go field recording. Shaun highlights the mixer’s small footprint, portability, and affordable price, concluding with a strong recommendation for anyone needing better audio in a remote‑work or content‑creation workflow.
Chapters
Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. You know, for quite some time I've been putting out videos here showing you different tools and techniques and strategies. I wanted to do something a bit different. I want to show you my setup here in my house. Now, you know, over the next series of videos, I'm going to be going around and just kind of showing you the, you know, my lifestyle and how I run my marketing agency here and take you along a journey. Today's video, I want to talk to you about a small USB audio mixer that I just picked up for my setup in the house. And my setups are here. Let's take a look at this. All right, so I got a standing desk from IKEA. It's motorized. I didn't know that when I bought it, but that was a great benefit to go up and down. I got my laptop, my MacBook Pro, and two side screens here. Works really well. Love being set up next to a window, like just the natural light coming in. So I've been doing a lot of meetings and Zoom calls, and I have a building outside, which I'll show you in another video, that I built for my office. And I've been finding that I've been working a lot inside the house lately, especially as we are coming through winter. And I wanted to be able to do some high-quality recording and training and everything inside, so I needed a microphone. Even though the microphone in the MacBook Pro is pretty decent, it's still not the best quality. Compared to like a studio condenser microphone like this. So MacBook Pro doesn't have an audio interface other than the little quarter-inch jack, so I needed a way to connect. And I went, I looked at Long and McQuade, and I looked up— this was about $100, $120 after tax. It is the USB Mix 4, and I'm just going to flip the camera around here and show you what I love about it. So this is it. As you see, the size of my hand, it's fairly small. I love the fact that it is very condensed. I'm just running one USB microphone with phantom power into it. It can run two, so if you need two, you have that. But what I really love about it is just the functionality that's built in here. I've got some main outs, headphone jacks that are here. If you're running an actual headset, I haven't seen this too much on different mixers here, but some of those computer headsets where you got the headphone jack and the microphone jack, the two 2 quarter-inch plugs. They've got that option in there. You got an MP3 in, you've got your record USB source— can be there a dry feed from your channel 1 and 2, your input mix, or a loopback. You got your monitors, your main mix, your computer level coming back here. It's just a nice condensed— and it sounds great when you're recording. I mean, look at the size of this here setup, right? There's the, the computer— sorry about the focus— but there's the computer and the mixers right there. So I love this thing. It's about $100. Like I said, I bought it $109 Canadian from Long McQuaid. It's Art Brand USB Mix 4. If you're doing podcasting or even if you're just doing Zoom calls and you want a higher quality microphone to plug in, this thing is awesome. Oh, and the other thing too, it is USB powered. So I am running into just a little dongle 'cause I've got USB-C here and that dongle that comes out to the regular standard USB has enough power to run through, so I don't have to use an actual AC adapter to plug it in. So yeah, if you're looking for something, I highly recommend this one here, and it's portable. I can take it with me anywhere. So if I want to take my laptop with me and do some recording out in the field or on location, easy to throw it in a backpack and take it with me. So check it out, it's the Art USB Mix 4.
