A dark, mysterious box arrived at Sonic Towers containing a ransom style note, a video and a brand new (yet to be announced) Onyx 820i Premium Analog Mixer with Perkins EQ and Firewire , plus what turned out to be a bit of a bombshell.

Also in the box was a boxed copy of Digidesign (or should that be Avid?) Pro Tools 8 M-Powered My initial thoughts were: What's that doing in there, they won't work together? But then the penny began to drop - I can be a bit slow sometimes.

What Mackie have done is written a driver - the Mackie Universal Driver V1.0, which appears to circumvent the ProTools/Digidesign hardware protection that ties Digidesign or M-Audio hardware to M-Powered software. Essentially they have cracked the code. This means that you can use the new Mackie Onyx i Series mixers as the audio hardware  component of a Pro Tools LE system, using it as the audio I/O, yes, that's right, you did read that correctly. I've not had a chance to extensively test this at the time of writing, but I intend to take a closer look.

There is no official word on this for now, so we'll have to wait "a few weeks". Mackie have yet to make an announcement. It is not clear whether this is sanctioned by Avid or not.

Now I've told you, I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life with a guilty conscience - coz I guess by now the dog will be pushing up daisies. But then, I never liked Chihuahuas...

More Information

• Mackie.com - Onyx iSeries not out yet

Mackie Social

• Mackie Launches DLZ Creator 23-May-23
• Mackie Expands CR-X Line 21-Oct-22
• Mackie Redesigns Thump Loudspeaker Series 11-Aug-22
• Mackie Launches Ins and Outs Podcast 02-Jun-20
• NAMM 2020: Mackie Expands Headphones Line 17-Jan-20