Review: Mackie Onyx 1640i
Mackie has cracked the impenetrable nut: third-party ProTools hardware compatibility.
17 May 2010
Review: Robin Gist
The big news about the Mackie Onyx 1640i mixer/interface is its Firewire driver compatibility with ProTools M-Powered v8+. This is the first time Avid (the owners of Digidesign, M-Audio and now Euphonix) has sanctioned alternative hardware – other than its own M-Audio line of interfaces – for use with M-Powered ProTools software.
Mackie has a reputation for successfully identifying a market niche and filling it with a product that gives you both ‘bang for buck’ and good sound. Who’d ’ave thunk it? As their old ads used to say… “Many hits have been made on Mackies.” In this case, combining a small-format – in fact, rack-mountable – 16-channel into four bus mixer with a 24-bit/96k, 16-channel Firewire audio interface and ProTools software compatibility, could well be exactly what many audio consumers with project studios are looking for. Mackie might just have a hit of its own on its hands. And of course, let’s not forget the console’s potential in the live mixing and installation markets. With its ability to (multi-track) record a live gig to a laptop computer equipped with a suitable audio application, and, at the same time, cover FOH and monitor mixing duties, the 1640i has the flexibility to become an integral part of countless compact yet powerful live recording and mixing setups.
MACKIE: METAL HEADS
First impression right out of the box is that the 1640i looks quintessentially Mackie. With its dark grey colouring, white markings and coloured knobs, it fits the company’s long established design aesthetic to a tee. Following on the Mackie tradition of rugged build quality, the 1640i’s housing is constructed from steel, giving the console a sturdiness that imparts a sense of substance and an expectation of reliability.
From the factory the units ships with its adjustable I/O pod – what Mackie calls the ‘Rotopod’ – set into what I would call the ‘horizontal’ (others might even call the ‘Missionary’) position. In this arrangement, your connectors are in line (parallel) with the desk’s operating surface. The Rotopod is a great idea actually; the I/O connectors can be set into one of three different positions passing through 180 degrees. This gives you plenty of flexibility in fixed installations and road casing choices, allowing you to make your configuration decision based on the 1640i’s specific application, location and space requirements.
The Rotopod’s rear panel houses all of the connections required for the mixer: mic inputs on XLRs, TRS line inputs and unbalanced inserts per channel. The main outputs are on both XLR and TRS connectors. Two Firewire connectors feature amongst the other usual suspects, along with direct analogue recording outputs for channels 1–16 on two Tascam standard pin-out DB25 ‘D-sub’ connectors.
FADE OVER FUNCTION
In operation, all the switches on the 1640i have a positive feel and the rotary EQ & aux controls operate smoothly. The console’s faders, on the other hand, have a bit more ‘lateral slack’ in them compared to the old eight-bus series, and as such don’t feel quite as inviting as their forebears. Having said that, I’d be very surprised if they weren’t up to the rigours of live use and abuse, as well as the sometimes seemingly more genteel studio environment.
While on the subject of faders, there’s unfortunately been an ergonomic trade-off in constraining the width of the mixer to make it fit into a standard 19-inch rack: the fader caps are still relatively wide and, consequently, cover the gain position markings along the fader slot. If you want to put the fader into its unity position – or any other referenced position for that matter – you have to either guess, or try and line it up using the next channel along. A small complaint, perhaps, but surely this could have been easily solved by using slightly narrower caps.
Given that ‘old school’ analogue mix summing is one of the selling points of this unit, I think allowing for space around the fader caps to make a few Chinagraph pencil marks would have also been beneficial. Worse than that, my digits are almost too big to operate the bus assignment switches when the faders are hovering in low gain positions. There’s just not enough space between them, but I guess that’s the trade-off with rackmount mixers generally.
THE GREY STRIPES
Beginning at the top of each channel strip, there’s a cluster of switches and a preamp gain control with a marked mic gain range of –20dB to +40dB. The noise specs on the Onyx preamps are pretty good and this is apparent in use. I tested them on a variety of input sources ranging from voice to acoustic and electronic instruments. The preamps proved more than capable, in each case sounding clean, clear and open.
Each channel has an individually switchable 48V phantom power option along with a 75Hz low-cut filter. The third switch (common to all channels) is the Firewire/line input switch that toggles between the analogue mic/line input stage and the digital Firewire connection from your DAW – an LED indicates a channel’s input status.
Channels 1 & 2 also have a high-impedance switch that allows for the direct connection of guitars, basses and the like. Just below the gain knob is the Firewire pre/post switch that gives you the option of putting your EQ ‘to tape’ when you’re tracking to your DAW. There are also various mods listed in Mackie’s user manual that cover insert and fader variations with respect to what goes down the Firewire. This affords you even greater flexibility in your setup, allowing you to fine-tune the 1640i to best suit your intended application. Bear in mind, however, these mods need to be carried out by an authorised Mackie agent if you want to preserve your warranty.
NEED TO KNOW
PERKY EQ
According to its designers, Cal Perkins and Greg Mackie, the design goal of the Perkins four-band EQ was to “bring the classic EQ sound of British mixing consoles of the ’60s and ’70s and put it into a small-format mixer.” As Mackie humourously points out on its website, in that era, there were almost as many different types of EQ circuitry design as there were console designers!
Perkins & Mackie ultimately settled on a ‘Wein Bridge’ topology that gives a wider and more musical – but less surgical – ‘Q’. They have refined and improved the design to give +15dB of control without overly narrowing the bandwidth of the filters. Each channel has a high-frequency shelf at 12kHz, two sweepable high and low mid bands covering 100Hz to 8kHz, and a low-frequency shelf at 80Hz.
I found the EQ surprisingly usable when I applied it to mixes, and I enjoyed the immediacy of reaching for a knob and having it work instantly as opposed to the less direct process of digital EQing. (Each channel also has an EQ in/out switch that allows you to completely bypass the EQ section of the circuitry when you’re not using it.)
CARE FOR AN AUX?
The next section of the Onyx – below the EQ and above the channel pan pots – features the six auxiliary send pots, coloured in pairs of burgundy, jaffa and British racing green. Having this many sends is a great feature for live work as well as allowing for a plethora of outboard processor options in a studio environment. Another one of the aforementioned mods is to have the aux sends ‘pre’, rather than post EQ, which may be preferable if the sends are to be used mainly for stage monitoring in a live situation.
To their right, a switch in the aux master section allows you to route sends 1–6 to Firewire inputs 9–14 on your computer. This means you can send to your DAW’s effects (either stand-alone or host-based) and use your favourite plug-ins in a mix – live or in the studio. In this mode, mixer channels 9–14 are no longer available to send via Firewire as you might expect but this is just one of the many Firewire routing options available to the user. Some of the other options include: assigning Firewire inputs 1 & 2 to the main mix – useful for playing back MP3s and other files from a computer during a live show break, and assigning the four sub-master outputs to Firewire inputs 5–8 to record sub-mixes.
NO PAY, NO PLAY
As mentioned earlier, the 1640i’s ability to interface with ProTools M-Powered v8+ is a big selling point and after having run a series of initial tests and recordings using Samplitude as the host application, it was finally time to check out just how well ’Tools and the Onyx1640i worked together.
Entering ‘The House Of Avid’ to get the Onyx to commune with M-Powered ProTools comes at an additional cost: US$49.99. Once you’ve paid for the requisite driver, you then download it from the Mackie website. Each driver is specific to each individual Onyx console, and you’re required to register your mixer and go through an authorisation process to activate the driver associated with that mixer. After removing my M-Audio Fast Track Pro drivers and trashing my M-Powered ’Tools preferences from my test rig, I was good to go – installation and authorisation was straightforward and the 16 ins and outs showed up effortlessly in M-Powered ProTools.
I repeated some of my earlier tests, did some new recordings, and ran a 24-bit/96k session, recording 16 tracks without a problem. The system felt stable and ran without any hesitations or hiccups, much to my relative amazement.
NO GAIN, NO PAIN
One particular Firewire assignment I was keen to test once ’Tools was up and running was the “Assign main mix to Firewire 15–16” option. As the name suggests, this switch lets you feed the resulting mix of channels 1–14 and aux returns back into your DAW via Firewire inputs 15 and 16. Think of this configuration as the way you might bounce down tracks within your audio application except that, in this case, you’re passing your signals back through the mixer’s analogue channels. This gives you the facility of analogue EQ, an analogue summing bus and some external analogue processing either as inserts or aux send/returns, or both. In a live gig situation, one handy application of this feature is to record a stereo mix of the gig for reference, or perhaps more importantly, so you can burn and sell some CDRs of the gig at the end of the night’s performance.
My testing of this setup initially resulted in what I thought was a low-level signal back into the DAW. The level ‘back to tape’ is independent of – and therefore not controlled by – the main mix fader. Further investigation of this via the Mackie forums revealed that the A/D converters in the 1640i are calibrated so they don’t reach clipping until the analogue output reaches clipping. It’s suggested on the forum that you could run your channels a bit hotter or gain up the mix after recording it back into the DAW to overcome this situation.
Neither of these ideas seemed ideal to me, so my own work-around involved patching the analogue main outs back into the analogue inputs of channels 15 and 16. This meant the main mix fader became a ‘mix to tape’ level control and I could monitor at an independent level through the control room outputs – problem solved. In my humble opinion, the inclusion of a ‘level to tape’ control or even a switch that could engage the main fader to control this input level would be a really useful inclusion.
Once I had the level issues sorted, I must say I really enjoyed getting a mix up on the faders quickly, applying some analogue EQ, patching some old outboard gear into the mix and then recording it all back into the DAW with some manual fader moves to boot.
A FINISHED MASTER
Rounding out the feature set on the1640i is the requisite master section with sub-mix faders and routing, main stereo fader, a talkback mic with provision for an external alternative, and a control room/headphones section that covers routing and level duties. The rudimentary four-segment metering on each channel is augmented by a 12-segment stereo master meter, which also doubles as a solo level meter. Each channel also has a solo and mute switch with a LED to indicate status. All up Mackie has crammed lots of usable features into this small-format console.
ONYA MACKIE
There’s no doubt the Mackie Onyx 1640i is a well thought out console. It’s flexible, has loads of features, numerous routing options, sounds good and doubles as a multi-channel audio interface. What clearly sets it apart from its competition is its potential for integration with the ubiquitous ProTools software (of the M-Powered persuasion). Based on this alone, the 1640i will no doubt find many loving homes in project studios, clubs, theatres and live rigs the world over, and it may well put Mackie back in the charts.
RESPONSES