MyVolts mickXer - interview with Caroline Swords

As mentioned last week, I've been trying out a beta version of myVolts' latest product; a five input passive mixer. I was so impressed with the product so far that I fired some questions to Caroline Swords, Director of Operations at the company, to get a bit of an insight into the product and what they were aiming for here. Caroline was kind enough to come back to me with some detailed answers, plus a first look at the version 2 of the mickXer.

What was the impetus for developing this product and were there any specific goals in mind?

myVolts has been around for more than a decade now, powering everyone's gear. We love talking our customers, seeing what power problems they have, and trying hard to solve them. But as each users' setup is unique you really have to listen, see what the sticking points are, and develop products that really make a difference to the creative - like we tried to do with the myVolts 5-way power splitter cable for Korg Volcas. The (very vocal Volca) community really embraced it, made some suggestions on how to improve it, and we listened, getting V2 of the product out within a couple of months.

myVolts became matey with Sonic State's Gaz Williams, Bassist and Music Technologist, when we sent him our power splitter for Korg Volcas - he loved it, and Sonic State featured it in their Volca Vibes series of vids.

We kept in touch, and Gaz reached out later when he was looking for a passive mixer - he wanted something with a few 3.5mm outputs, 1 x 3.5mm output, to simply mix down gear like the Korg Volcas, Roland Boutiques, Pocket Operators, and the many other lovely little noisemaking miracles that seem to come out over other day, making us all happy but broke.

There were some other things he wanted too, like coloured audio cables, straight on one end and right-angled on the other, and we have those in the pipeline, available soon - but breaking his wants down, it seemed like a little passive mixer was definitely doable, could be a whole new area for us, and might even be fun to develop. We reckoned if we could make him happy, we could make most of our other customers happy! So Gaz's unbridled joy = goal number one.

And we all know powering multiple doo-dahs from the same PSU can introduce ground loops and other unwanted hums and noises, so we wanted our little passive mixer to clean up the signal too, especially good for users of our power splitter cables for Volca and Boutiques. So more fun gear but less unwanted noise = goal number two.

Lastly, it presented a good chance to make a more structured process in the myVolts week for developing new products, so it led to what we called NoiseLAB - a weekly Thursday session for brainstorming and doing, under the guidance of our mate maker Mick Kelly, just up the road in his workshop in Pearse Street, Dublin 4. We developed a few products there - the new Hot Tip PSU tester came out of these sessions too. So some structured in-house development = goal number 3.

Was there a design decision for choosing five inputs?

4 seemed like too few and 6 seemed like too many! It's hard to know with something like this, so we asked around, used our common sense, and 5 was the answer! If i we got it wrong, you guys can let us know, and we can make more options.

What interesting challenges have you faced when developing this?

Just a steep learning curve to making, really! And figuring out what to do, more or less from scratch. The version we're releasing is our 6th iteration, here's a couple of the earlier first gos- compete with very lumpy solder.

My soldering capabilities have greatly improved over the last year - seriously, if your want something soldered, just give me a shout.

What's the next step for this product?

A simple case is getting designed as I write this, I just talked to the designer this morning. We've our manufacturer armed and ready for final files, so we're just gearing up to press go...

What options for cases are you planning?

I was talking to Ian Bradshaw, Korg Hi-Tech Products Category Manager, and sent him on prototype to check out. He's mad into 3D printing, so he made a lovely case for it and sent me the files, and stuck them up on https://www.thingiverse.com - it made me think, would our users like a case-less, bare version for a little bit cheaper, and for us to provide .STL files so they can mod and print them themselves? I'll need to ask around, but if anyone has thoughts on that, please get in touch!

How much is this projected to cost? (I am guessing around £15-20 plus postage)

You've guessed right! It'll be a little bit dearer than the Belkin Rockstar, but not much.

When might this be available?

I'm hoping October or November 2018!

Thanks to Caroline and myVolts for their time and detailed answers!