Mixer Send/Return - explain it to me?

[JuxtaPoser]

Can someone explain to me in simple terms what the Send/Return jacks on a mixer like the 700/800 are for?

More info: I'm looking to run a Jack output from a band's mixing desk into a DJM700 to play through a club's house system. Would the return inputs be suitable for this? If so, how do I go about doing it? If not, has anyone got any other suggestions?

[Estacy]

a send/return is simple: its like an alternate routing on the freeway. the traffic goes along the freeway, your main out. the cars are your channels, you decide how much they ride on the freeway. Now, those cars are a bit boring, but no worries: the freeway has an alternate route, any cars send there (and you can send everything that's on the freeway to just one car) will instantly get new rims. However, traffic can still pass trough on the freeway, unless you enable the alternate route to be the only route. Thats basically what a send return does.

you can connect effects to it and music that is sent trough the send/return will return with the effect. its up to the mixer whether or not the original signal is killed in favour of the new signal (with effects).

[Buszaj]

The send/return is essentially a routing for processing. When selected and engaged, your signal from your mixer will be sent to this processing area. (It will often be an external effects unit). When the processing area is done working with your mixers signal, it will send it back to your mixer, altered.

For your application, it isn't useful. If you want to run the band's mixing board through your DJM mixer, their outputs will have to be routed into an input channel on your DJM mixer. From there, I assume the outputs from your DJM go into the main PA.

[Manu]

mostly used for effects, compression etc, it's pretty much a channel inside your channel.



http://cl.ly/4hWl/we-need-to-go-deeper-25325-1281381389-18.jpg

[JuxtaPoser]

Cheers for clearing that all up for me guys, I ended up working out a solution on the fly last night so it wasn't a big deal. Much appreciated, I'd always wondered how FX loops worked with the send/return.

[FCruzDJ]

See attached. This is how I use Send/Return on my DM1775.

[ampnation]

I'm not sure how good your fix was for that gig so thought I would chime in.

I have a 16 channel live sound mixer and a DJ mixer that I am starting to use together quite often. When I do, I route the main outs from my DJ mixer to the last 2 channels on my live sound mixer. I do this because I don't have balanced inputs on my DJ mixer and even if I did, I don't have that many channels. To do it right using my DJ mixer as primary, I would have to use an isolation transformer or figure out how to pull the unbalanced signal from the balanced input. (My live sound mixer doesn't have any unbalanced outs)

So for the future, I would pick up a small desk format mixer for utility functions like this. You would route the band's mixer and your DJ mixer to this small format mixer. How small would depend on you, but I would try to get as many XLR mic/line inputs as possible. If you don't forsee more than this being routed through your system, I would look at having 6 mic/line XLR's in so you have 2 spare for unforeseen or in case a channel goes bad/out. I think the sweet spot between quality and price belongs to Yamaha MG mixers for this category. Depending on your needs, Peavey and Soundcraft might have what you need too.

EDIT: Just went to Yamaha's website and it looks like they're starting to thin their MG mixer selections and expanding others. They've added a couple of nice new mixers -- the MGP12X and MGP16X which have some features usually found on digital mixers so kind of a analog/digital hybrid. One neat feature is the ability to tweak the FX using an iPod or iPhone with a downlaodable app. It also has compressors and gates. The balanced inputs are multi-jacks which take XLR or TRS. A little pricey but not bad for what you get.