I’ve been doing the whole “plug in/unplug” thing for a while now with all my gear into my fastrack pro to my computer… but i’ve gotten quite sick of it.. and the sound quality isn’t always the greatest…
So i’ve thought to get a mixer.. I’ve been looking around and I’m heading towards a Mackie Onyx 1620i.. I hear good things about how clean it is etc, but I heard some people worry about the levels in their DAW’s when recording is much lower than the mixer itself. Weird.
What kind of mixers are people here using? Any suggestions or tips?
Personally, I’m saving up for an Allen & Heath 24 track but it’s like $1,800 bucks.
I have a 16 track Behringer 16 track rack mounted mixer along with the Yamaha and I find myself unplugging etc etc etc. Seems a bit crazy to spend that kind of money on such a serious mixer for home use but a friend of mine told me it will be the last Mixer I’ll ever need.
Mackie 1202 (1st generation…). Still works/sounds great! Even after I accidently spilled half a tall boy down it during practice last week… Keep liquids away from gear, kids!
I heard good things about the Allen & Heath mixers… Though the ones I’ve seen in the store were USB instead of Firewire… I heard somewhere that USB was worse on latency than firewire when recording and playing into a DAW.
I don’t use it as a firewire interface, if that is what you mean. The analog mixer side of it is pretty much the same as the gen1 Onyx series, sounds great, flexible. No incidence of low levels in my experience.
Not sure if it’s too much mixer, but the Mackie 1640i is a beast. Only one other of its kind I know of, the allen &heath zed16. The zed has transport controls for DAW, the Mackie doesn’t, but both have 16 in 16 out firewire. The Mackie can route any of 6 auxes, 4 subgroups, main mix, or 16 channels to FW (16 FW ins/outs at a time). Multiply that by the busses/auxes in your DAW, since you can send FW back down a channel from your DAW and uses plug ins in real time on Analog audio, you have a ridiculous routing matrix, which has not failed me yet in any signal flow problems, always a way to go where I want and try new routes all the time. As far as its sound, very transparent, almost like a complex XLR cable, no coloration In = Out. Not to plug it, I don’t worj for them or anything, but its one of the gear choices that i have never second guessed on the decision. I also use Vintech (Neve 1073 clones) on everything, and they are unbelievable sounding. Also I highly recommend tape for analog synths. After a long time sussing out my synth/instrument setup, I found that having a Voyager allowed me to settle into contentness with my keyboard gear and I delved into the signal processing side of things, and really found some interesting matches. Running the Voyager into vintage compressors and tape, etc. Again, analog tape,with a good machine like a studer or ampex, or even nagra/stellavox/Otari is the ultimate analog vibe processor in my opinion. You guys heard of the Anamod tape emulator.?It’s an analog computer(!) that simulates any kind of tape or machine fron Otari, Ampex, 3MCI, etc. Badass. I’ll stop rambling.
Even after I accidently spilled half a tall boy down it during practice last week… Keep liquids away from gear, kids! 