Installation

The devil is in the details, as Mackie well knows. Frankly, I was worried about how easy it was going to be to get this thing on line. An external automation system, dependent on an array of other host systems that may or may not work well together, seems a little chancy. In this case, there's good news and all right news.

To begin with, I worried about the VCA rack unit. I have a TT patch bay, already hardwired at considerable expense (i.e. more $ than the console!). The idea of butchering my wiring harness to replace my console insertion points with 1/4" jacks was really making me neurotic, and a 1/4" bay is unthinkable with 500 jacks (which is just about the minimum you need with a 32-input console/24-track studio), just because of size. The way Mackie has set up the unit, there are 1/4" jacks on the back that can be used as tip/ring/sleeve input/output jacks (a single jack per channel, a la the accessory send/receive jack on the console) or as a pair of input/output jacks. All of this is thoughtfully half-normalled for easy setup. On the front of the unit, additional 1/4" jacks are provided so that in addition to automation, you can still patch in effects. The VCA is actually between the return jack on the front of the panel and the return jack on the back of the panel. Again, everything is half-normalled so that it's no big deal to get it right. Happily, Mackie has thoughtfully seen fit to illustrate a broad range of patching possibilities in the manual.

Anyway, what to do? Once I thought it through, the proper installation became obvious and it gives my patch bay some added flexibility as well. I set it up so the VCAs are patched in series with the return line from the TT bay to the accessory receive lines on the console.

This involves the use of a single tip/ring/sleeve plug wired into the return line and plugged into the back of the Ultra-34 per channel. Now, the niceness that accrues from this is that for all of the channels so treated I have both TT and 1/4" patching available, a little extra that will probably come in handy a zillion times, to a point where I'll begin to wonder how I ever got along without it. Happily, I had enough extra cable length in the accessory send/return bundle so that I could just pop everything right in. Hopefully, you do too.

The other installation news that's OK but not great is that Mackie requires OMS version 2.0 for the MIDI interface. Now, I have a love/hate relationship with OMS (actually more hate than love, but I can live with it) and installation day was no exception. Mackie supplied a copy of OMS 2.0 but no documentation. Naturally it took us about eight man-hours to get it working (which is definitely not plug and play), and as is usually the case with OMS, I'm not quite sure what I did right finally to get it to work. Anyway, it does work and so do my synths, sequencers and time code, so I'm pretty a happy camper now.

What this all means is that if you plan it out, you can manage a complete installation in a day, including the patch bay integration. If you're really adept with both a soldering iron and OMS, you should be able to bring the thing on line in a morning, which is really pretty good for such a fundamentally central element as console automation.

Definitely manageable.

Fig. 1: Mackie Automation installed signal flow

	Mackie Automation installed signal flow. The Mackie Ultra 34 VCA package is installed in series with the accessory send/receive TT patch points, and after them in the flow. The rear patching on the Ultra 34 (not shown permits the physical in/out patch to be done with a single 1/4" TRS phone plug.