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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

For everyone drooling over the design of this, here’s a fun little form-over-function tidbit from the fine print:

> high quality, slimline cables custom-made for TX–6. the narrow profile allows you to use all 6 channels at once and makes for an easy pack down.

Sounds like the input jacks are so close together not every 3.5mm audio cable will work with it. Like a phone without a headphone jack - bring a special adaptor or no sounds for you. Lol

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yes, but you can use non-adjascent ports with standard 3.5mm audio cables - if you are that bothered, assume it's a 3 channel board with an option to upgrade to 6 if you buy the special cables.

Did you just “You’re holding it wrong” me? :)

They could have brilliantly designed their way out of that by making the whole thing ~1.5cm wider (3mm extra five times).

A zoom h6 is a well designed portable battery powered mixer / audio interface with 4 easily accessible inputs and two that might need an adaptor depending on your cabling. It also comes with two high quality microphones, and records without being tethered to another device. For $409

3 channels for the price of 6 is still a terrible deal.

It's Teenage Engineering, so more like the price of 8 or 12. Also, no balanced inputs.

Balanced inputs are useful for cancelling noise in long cable runs. There are no long cable runs if your target audience is people making aesthetic 60s instagram videos of their “synth jam in nature” with $2000 of gear in shot and $2000 more to film it.

Exactly. This is the type of equipment to appear in shot of your recording studio YouTube video not the kind of thing you find back of house at a professional setup.

Regardless of their utility in this device, they are present in many competing devices and they add to the cost.

Darn. I saw TRRS and assumed balance mono inputs.

lol

Taking a look at a pic of the back the jacks look to be about 3mm apart, which seems fine for most 3.5mm straight jack cables. What I'm betting is that most people don't have 6 3.5mm to 3.5mm cables, given that most boards and interfaces take 1/4"

3mm of space only leaves room for 1.5mm of extra radius per cable. I just eyeballed my cable drawer and I only saw one kind that might fit next to each other with that little clearance. It’s gonna be a pain… not a huge pain, but a pain nonetheless. idk why they couldn’t just add a little extra width and avoid the pain with most cables. Especially since what you’ll need most of the time isn’t going to be the 1/8” to 1/8” cables they’re going to give you - but 1/4” to 1/8” cables - since most instruments have 1/4” outputs

To be fair, 3.5mm and 1/4" are virtually equivalent ports, and the only reason 1/4" is used for audio interfaces is because of convention (and probably because it's easier to grab). Converters between them should be dirt cheap.

It's not like Apple shipping 2022 iPhones with Lightning v/s USB C

Converters are an issue when the whole point is small size.

I wish they'd develop a full USB-C alternate mode for pro audio.

One C cable could do dozens of channels, or one of legacy analog, and provide clean regulated power for wireless gear, and the connectors pack very densely.

You could even make it daisy chainable, plus speakers could be powered over PD at small shows, and so could lights.

At 0.5mm pitch between connectors the crosstalk would be nasty.

I was thinking all-digital where possible, only using analog for 1 or 2 channel legacy connections

I feel like digital cables is a fundamentally backwards-idea for audio devices. Audio is analog and if you're going to be using digital cables, you'll just need to add a bunch of DACs in the chain.

Can’t believe no one’s said if you’re spending $1200 bucks on this thing, you can probably drop $60 on some cables.

It’s not about the cost of cables. It’s about the inconvenience of only some cables working. What happens if you lose/forget a cable, or if one dies on you while you’re out in the world using it? It’s much easier to replace a 3.5mm cable than it is to replace a 3.5mm cable that has a pretty narrow spec to it.

It’s also about what people will have. Walk into any show in the world and they’ll have XLR, and most productions will have 3.5 in their bag of tricks. But a specialized cable is something you’ll have to depend on yourself for.

This is actually an advantage in some cases - if you have an iPhone for example there’s very likely to be someone nearby with a charger just because how common they are.

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