To Start With, A Little History

Mixing consoles have been around since DJs (we called them announcers back then) began to complain that they needed to be able to hear the cued-up program material without sending it out over the air and some tech-jock stopped fooling around with souping up the transmitter long enough to build a little box that would permit the DJ to control his level, the level of his program material, a bus to mix the two together, and a signal-routing network to permit him to control what he heard independently of what was being sent to the transmitter.

Being impressionable, like musicians, DJs went wild over such cool gadgetry and said things like: "Jeez, that is totally awesome! Man, you could sell that thing and make millions! Everybody'd buy one!" The tech-jock, being equally impressionable, would then hunker down at the bench, add some meters and flashing lights, and dream up names for things that only a nerd's Aunt Minnie could love, like "The TwiStar X2000 Ultramatic" and "Master Fader" and "Line Level Program Group" and "Volume Unit Meter." He'd then market the thing, and maybe be successful in selling enough of them to finance the development of more complicated versions, such as "The TwiStar® X4000 7.2 Ultralinearmaster®." This is time-honored way it is done.

Sometimes, such products turn out to be really excellent.

The Mackie 8•Bus Console (available in 16-, 24- and 32-input versions) is the latest, most complex offering from a company whose background has been firmly grounded in both the above tradition and the semi-pro low-cost mixer market. It is an evolutionary product, firmly rooted in the multi-track recording tradition. What distinguishes it from the pack is a rather amazing price for the amount of function: $4995 MSRP for 32 input sections, plus 8 submasters, a rudimentary patch bay and a decent master control section. If you allow $1500 for the master section and submasters, that's approximately $110 per input module. By my somewhat cynical reckoning, it doesn't seem reasonable that there could be much quality there for that price - $110 just doesn't go very far any more (a really nice dinner for two, with hooch, f'rinstance). So I was interested to get one of these l'il cuties in the mail to test in my very own studio. It doesn't hurt that I'm in the market for a console, and if this sucker works anything close to like what they claim, it'll be a leading contender in the Dave Moulton Console Sweepstakes.