New Mackie Onyx i Series Promise ProTools

US Firewire recording mixers from 8-16 channels 11/09/09

Take a closer look (click to enlarge)

Buying Choices

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The new range of Mackie Onyx i Series mixers bring the tasty Onyx mic preamps and Perkins EQ into the domain of the compact mixer. The built in FireWire interface also gives a direct connection into your computer and DAW software. What makes these desks even more special is the inclusion of the new Mackie Universal Driver - currently at V.1.0.

You may have heard already that this driver has broken the link (some say cracked) between Avid/ Digidesign's Pro Tools and their hardware. This new driver allows this Mackie hardware to work with Pro Tools M-Powered as if it were M-Audio hardware (Avid also own M-Audio).

This news has been in the public domain for some time - in fact I think we broke it, but we're still not totally clear with the way Avid feel about this bold move from Mackie.

But on with the mixers themselves:

All mixers in this Onyx i range - the 8ch 820i, 12ch 1220i, 16ch 1620i and the discrete four bus 1640i offer Mackies second generation Onyx mic preamps - they do sound rather nice and have an incredibly low noise floor, plus 24-bit 96kHz audio IO.

The British boutique Perkins EQ, pre/post configurable sends, separate headphone and control room levels give you a mixer that can be used either live with a firewire send out per channel for live recording, or in the studio with a stereo Firewire audio return for monitoring the DAW output.

The 1640i, features a full 16 firewire audio returns, switchable, one per channel with configurable subgroup, aux sends and master outputs to Firewire for complete integration should you need the extra flexibility. In fact the 1640i looks like the way to go if you need really comprehensive routing. A limitation that I've found in the past with integrated audio inteface/mixers, is that you cant merge audio inputs into a single Firewire input

Features

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Premium Recording Mixers with 24-bit/96kHz FireWire

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Qualified by Mackie for use with all major DAWs, including: