After graduating from Soldering 101, I quickly became addicted to the smell of solder — which is kind of like a mix of wet newspaper and wet dog. Given that explanation the addiction makes little sense, but those of you who are likewise afflicted will understand.

The business end

Input/Output

Anyway, I fired up another DIY audio kit though this one is quite a bit less complicated. It's an 8-channel passive summing mixer from a little outfit in Florida called Sofiteque and it's very simple. Eight channels of audio come in where their amplitude is reduced via some resistors before combining into two channels, left and right. Viola!

The basic idea of analog summing is that doing the final mixdown to stereo in the analog realm yields more ear-pleasing results than having the computer "crunch the numbers", so to speak. In any case, this is all the rage in the audio engineering community and the latest form of backlash against perceived harshness of digital audio. Worth a try, right?

Anyhoo ... Here are a couple pics of the construction of this kit. No "hacks" on this one just yet. At some point I may cobble two kits together for 16 channels of summing, but for the moment I'll let the soldering iron cool, having satisfied my flux fix for now.

The kit

The Sofiteque kit

Pretty simple PCB

Pretty simple PCB

The guts

The guts

Link:  http://www.sofiteque.com/shop/pb8t-passive-summing-mixer-kit/