Tales of Mackie

My experience with Mackie products, up to now, has been mainly anecdotal. At Berklee, where I used to chair the Music Production and Engineering Department, the Music Synthesis Department bought some Mackies for use as little rack-mounted mixers and the word was that they were "quiet." On the basis of that, my department bought some for auxiliary keyboard-mixer use and have had them in service for a couple of years. Interesting anecdote #1: when one of our studio consoles began to get really noisy (faders and switches beginning to transmit mega-grunge any time they were moved more than a micro-inch), the manufacturer said, "Well, it's probably the environment - urban basement, y'know. Your problem. Sorry." It occurred to our chief engineer that the Mackie keyboard mixer in that room had gone into service at the same time as the main console and had never been cleaned or serviced (semi-pro auxiliary stuff leads a hard, hard life), so he pulled it and checked it out just to see how it compared with the "real" console. Turned out it was running just fine, thank you - met spec and exhibited no grunginess in fader or switch movements. Hmmmm. Impressive! Makes ya think, doesn't it?

Interesting anecdote #2: Guy I know does lots of classical location recording using a fairly pricey Euro mixer (name you would probably recognize as upscale audio). When it went down, he borrowed a Mackie. His observation: the Mackie's mic preamps were every bit as quiet, clean and transparent as those in the Euro mixer. Makes ya think even harder, perhaps even begin to wonder?

There are other interesting anecdotes, a fair number of 'em, generally speaking to excellent sonics, dynamic range and physical reliability of Mackie products. Equally important, I have never heard anybody trash Mackie. No tales of horror, no misadventures; the mythology is all happy faces. Collectively, these stories gives me good reason to hope that this Mackie product might be a good one, in spite of a price that simply screams: "Marginal!"

The Console Itself

So, wadda you get for your five big ones? The console is quite compact, at 45" wide by 28" deep by 5" high. The I/O strips are not removable modules; the control surface is a single panel. The jack field is at the top of the strips, with console patching on the top and multi-track patching on the back. The I/O strips have jacks for mic and line in, tape in, insertion point send and receive and direct out. Mic inputs are XLR, everything else is TRS 1/4" phone. The mic, line and tape inputs are balanced.

The master section includes eight meters for the buses plus a stereo meter for the main output. There are six mono auxiliary buses, and six stereo auxiliary returns. There is a rudimentary monitor section including two headphone sends, a single monitor select section with separate levels and jacks for control room and studio monitors, a stereo solo bus and a talkback section with built-in mic. There is also a master level and assignment for "Mix B," which is normally the tape monitor mix from the I/O strips.

The power supply is a separate rack-mountable box with a 12-foot umbilical cable to the console. The supply is mercifully quiet in operation (I measured 38 dBA SPL 6" from the side of the supply - in a normal installation the unit will easily be masked by an NC-20 noise floor) and seems plenty robust.

You want a meter bridge? $895 gets you 32 12-segment bargraph meters plus analog VU meters for the main outs in a package that clips onto the top of the jack field. You can switch (in groups of eight) between bus and tape. You want more inputs? An 24-input expander package is in the works, but I couldn't find out the price. There are jacks for lights for live work, but you gotta buy the lights. You wanna set the whole thing on something more robust than a card table (it weighs 64 pounds), they'll send you a stand for $295. Too lazy to move faders in real time? There'll be a levels 'n mute automation package, utilizing any popular computer with or without a separate fader package available sometime in 1994, price TBA.