Review: Mackie MR8mk2
Mackie two-way monitors have become a staple diet in the pro-audio world. This latest serve dishes up quite an earful.
22 August 2011
Review: Calum Orr
Lately I’ve been feeling the need to upgrade my speakers, as we all sometimes do. Recently I’ve built a new house, and within that I’ve designed a custom mixing room that’s nearly double the size of my old working environment. For about 15 years now I’ve been using a combination of Auratones, Yamaha NS-10s and PMC TB-2s, and while I know them like the back of my hand, the size of this new room is demanding a different speaker, one that goes significantly lower in frequency. In fact, to put my finger on it more specifically, I need a speaker that features an eight-inch driver, not a six, as per my NS-10s and TB-2s.
With this in mind I’ve been scouring the worldwide web looking at various manufacturers, models and their various prices. Although I would love to try out something like the ATC SM50As, which retail for crazy money, I’m not going to give myself any of that ‘unfortunately they have to go back’ heartache. Setting my maximum spend at $4000 leaves just about every competitor still in the race, with well respected names like Mackie, Event, Quested, PMC, KRK and Adam all having monitors in this price bracket. In amongst this flurry of speaker swapping, I’ve recently had two new pairs of Mackies set up: the HR824mk2s and the MR8mk2s up for review here (which I might also add are three-grand under the budget!).
Out of the box the Mackie MR8mk2 active two-ways are substantial speakers: 40cm high, 28cm wide and 33cm deep, and weighing 12.5kg each. The cabinet is predominantly made of reinforced 15mm MDF, although the front panel is a moulded plastic affair (to serve as a high-frequency waveguide) and the back panel is metal, apart from the bass reflex port, which is also plastic. Around the low frequency driver is a ring of chrome-styled plastic, which I’m not all that enamoured with, but hey, it may float someone’s boat. The finish of the cabinet is black and the overall look is smooth and professional.
NEW & STANDARD FEATURES
The MR8mk2s have two newly designed transducers: an eight-inch high-precision, low-distortion, low-frequency driver and a one-inch neodymium silk-dome tweeter, both of which are set into (as opposed to mounted onto) Mackie’s custom waveguide front panel.
Connections around the back are plentiful – RCA, ¼-inch TRS and XLR options give you all the basic connection options – which is great, especially if you’re inclined to swap speakers around regularly like I am. Equalisation is provided on the rear panel to help ‘acclimatise’ the speakers to specific acoustic circumstances, with a ‘High’ ±2dB shelf centred around 5kHz and a ‘Low Boost’ shelving switch capable of boosting frequencies below 100Hz by either 2dB or 4dB. An On/Off switch is also positioned on the back panel along with venting for the Class-A/B amplifier and an unobtrusive volume pot, which only has a centre indent (and here it remained for the entirety of the review).
REFERENCES PLEASE
After finding the optimum placement for the speakers in the control room, which was about 1200mm from my listening position, I proceeded to listen to AC/DC’s Rock ’n’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution, it being one of my main listening references still. The song has phenomenal rock power with only limited instrumentation, and I was immediately impressed with the MR8mk2’s ability to really portray Malcolm Young’s guitar boldly and as intended. The decay of the instrument was smooth and its position in the soundstage was also easy to pinpoint in the mix. The snare crack in this song is also legendary (there’s even a ‘clean’ one in the intro for all you samplers out there) and here too, you could really hear the drum’s shell and the weight of the hit. After this I focused on the top end of the voice and the cymbal transients. While still impressive, I did feel things were a little bit ‘sandy’ up in the high frequencies.
NEED TO KNOW
Another of my reference songs is The Flaming Lips track Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell, from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots; a modern masterpiece in my opinion. This song features fantastic keyboard bass, spatial sound effects, a great vocal performance and even a clarinet on the outro! On the MR8mk2s, the song sounded mighty, so much so that I took the level up a notch, closed my eyes, and listened for foibles. This test reaffirmed that the bottom end representation on these monitors is amazing, especially for the price. Great midrange too… there’s a little bit of sandiness in the guitar shred around the crossover frequency and up to around 4kHz, but again, for the price, who’s to complain? Lastly, I turned to another test I use that’s a definite hard taskmaster: Andre 3000’s She lives In My Lap from the Love Below album. So brutally forward, frontal and kick drum driven, this song is a great test for punchiness and on this score the MR8mk2s delivered admirably. After listening to a hundred or more songs, I surmised I could wholeheartedly recommend these speakers to anyone on a budget.
Next up, I mixed two tracks on the MR8mk2s and both of these translated excellently when played back on other systems. And up against the Mackie HR824mk2s, which are three times the price, the MR8mk2s competed well –definitely not one-third as good. The HR824mk2s definitely have a smoother top-end and less perceivable distortion around the crossover point but both offer a similar low-end drive and stereo image.
One small point to note, however, is that at loud listening levels for over 40 minutes, the amps get mighty hot. So much so that the screws on the back panel become too hot to touch. Furthermore, there comes a point where the amplifier protection kicks in and the monitor begins to splutter and eventually shut off, so don’t expect to just listen at 110dB for hours on end (you shouldn’t be anyway). Personally, I think the protection feature will be a bonus for more inexperienced engineers who might want to run their systems ragged with excessive volumes, however, it may prove annoying for professionals or larger listening environments that require more SPL capability from their monitors.
Another feature aimed at protecting the intended owner’s investment is the 12dB per-octave high-pass filter that prevents frequencies below 40Hz from being amplified, thus saving the drivers from over-excursion that can sometimes lead to damage. A tad interventionist perhaps but I guess if you’re not hearing it you don’t need to put your monitors to task trying to replay it…
At around $500 each how can I not recommend the MR8mk2s?
RESPONSES