Recording - September 2010 - 30

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

Mackie Onyx-i Series Mixers
All this and seamless DAW interfacing too
I had a chance to live with two of the new Onyx-i mixers, one (the top-end 1640i) for several weeks and the other (the small 820i) for the better part of a year, and found the experience a delight. The lineup I’ll start with the three smaller Onyx-i mixers—the 820i, 1220i, and 1620i. Differences between them are primarily in number, rather than type, of features. The 820i has two mono mic/line input channels with inserts, two stereo line-only channels, and a “hybrid” channel that lets the user choose between a mono mic input or stereo line input. The 1220i has four mono mic/line channels and four stereo line channels, and the 1620i has eight mono and four stereo channels. The 820i and 1220i have two mono Aux sends and two stereo Aux returns, and the 1620i has four of each. Beyond that, these three mixers are functionally identical; we’ll see later that the 1640i is very different indeed. Getting in All of the mono channels have Onyx preamps with individually switchable 48 V phantom power, and the first two mono channels on each mixer have a Hi-Z switch for the mono 1/4" input to enable direct guitar or bass connections. While this is a nice touch for a bass (eliminating the need for a DI box), the newcomer to the Onyx-i might wonder who’d ever want to run a naked guitar signal straight into a mix. The handiness of this connection becomes obvious when you factor in the mixers’ ability to act as FireWire interfaces, offering guitar processing within a DAW. If you’ve always wondered if you can really hear the difference a Hi-Z input makes on a guitar’s tone, the simple ability to switch the circuit in and out makes for some fascinating experiments. Even on an acoustic guitar’s piezo pickup, the difference in fullness and solidity is pretty amazing—not a subtle thing at all! The mono channels have a 3-band Perkins eq with sweepable mid plus a switchable 75 Hz lowcut filter, and the stereo channels have three fixed eq bands (80 Hz Low, 2.5 kHz Mid, 12 kHz High). The 820i’s “hybrid” mono mic/stereo line channel has a 4-band fixed eq, with an added Low Mid at 400 Hz. I won’t take up too much space gushing about the Perkins eq on these boards; let’s just say that it’s nice to find an eq that actually makes you happy to have to use it, whether you’re fattening a bass’s bottom end, bringing up a bit of air on a cymbal, or accentuating the sweet spot in a guitar’s midrange. The 820i controls channel levels with pots, and the 1220i and 1620i have medium-throw faders. The Mute button actually doesn’t mute a channel at all; it removes the channel from the Main Mix bus and routes it instead to the Alt 3–4 bus. This time-honored Mackie innovation lets you use the otherwise stereo-bus mixers as faux 4-bus consoles,

Mackie’s Onyx mixers have been around for quite a few years now. They’ve introduced a number of features that Mackie has justifiably been proud of—perhaps most notably the Perkins channel eq controls, which offer a very musical and powerful set of tone-shaping tools with a lovely “British console” flavor, and the remarkably clean and sweet Onyx preamps, arguably the standard by which other affordable mixers’ pres are measured. The Onyx line, which included large rackmount multichannel interfaces and the short-lived and underrated Onyx Satellite portable interface, made good use of the intelligent high bandwidth of FireWire, which was an optional add-on to the original Onyx mixers. With the Onyx-i mixers, Mackie takes a strong step forward, completely integrating the many great features of the Onyx products with a comprehensive and remarkably easy-to-use FireWire implementation.
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RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2010

Recording - September 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2010