What mixers do you guys use?

[anoteoftruth]

A friend of mine has a couple of the Mackie mixers, a 1640i and a 12 channel version of the same hardware, both of which were intended to be used simultaneously under Mac OS X. It turns out that they can not be used at the same time.. supposedly the units use Apple's CoreAudio drivers, and Mackie says it is a problem with CoreAudio. Apple in turn says the problem is with Mackies implementation or lack of specific drivers. I don't really have any additional information offhand; there is probably more details available online, but I thought I would mention this issue in this thread since my friend made some specific support queries to arrive at this conclusion. I was pretty interested in the 1640i myself, but find this information a bit dismaying...

FYI.. YMMV

Yeah I bought the mackie onyx 1620i.... and have had nothing but stellar performance, except when pushing with my cpu...

for example... im on a old 2006 macbook.. running 10.4.11... and everything works great, except if I have Ableton and my music software, working while I have safari open... when safari is open I get a weird cliking / popping noise when i record, but as soon as I close safari, it goes back to being clean and clear..

Otherwise, I get nothing but a really clean perfect sound.

[EricK]

I want to clarify something about my mixer lag.

I noticed when I was doing a video. I recorded the video with a camera with its onboard mic. I also used the CP Mult to mult the audio signal, sending it to the mixer, which was hooked up via USB to the computer. This is the method that I used to get hi fi audio on my last video.

I lined up the audios on both the camera and with the logic audio and by the ned of the video I noticed that there is a fraction of a second delay. I guess this is the conversion in the mixer, so there probably is some lag through usb, just that the usb 2.0 isn't as bad as others. I don't notice this when I record directly in, but I really think that its more evident if I am using logic to overdub.

I thought that Id mention that since I noticed it a few days ago. For live recordings though that probably wont be an issue.

Eric

[willi]

Are you sure you are using the same sample rates with both the mixer input (USB) and the camera? Most DV cameras record audio at 48kHz, though some (Sony's are a common example) will record audio at 32kHz or 44.1kHz. If your video editing software allows clips of different sample rates to be placed in the same timeline, the audio/video sync will drift over time..

[EricK]

Neither one specifies what the sampling rate is and they can't be changed. Its just a point and shoot camera, so I think Im lucky to be able to shoot videos or get audio at all lol.

But yeah its probably both the camera and the mixer contributing to the sampling rate, and iMovie will let you put anything together without consideration for the sampling rate.

I guess this is what timecode was invented for lol.

[David Bulog]

Vintage Roland Class A Line Mixer SMX=800 from 1980
(from the same family as Dimension D)
BBC radiophonic workshop used these
You can pick these up for like $100 on ebay--its the best deal around

[Headphones]

I've got a Mackie CFX20 with built in effects. I tend to use my outboard effects unit more than the internal ones, but sometimes both can be pretty sweet.