Musician Forum - Band Discussion Board - BandMix

Sweet! A no compromise mixer that is totally user friendly. That has been my beef with digital boards of the past... massive capability and a menu driven PITA to set up and use.

Bravo Mackie!

Our base player is looking at getting this mixer for us to use. My Allen & Heath mixer is relatively new. I am thinking we will use his for indoor gigs and mine for outdoor gigs. We are starting to do more festival type gigs. The downside to this mixer is you have to use an ipad for the interface. the ipad hard docks to the mixer, it charges it while it is docked. The only other downer is IF it is anything like the screen on an iphone you will have a hard time seeing the screen in outdoor brighter light use. The upside is we all have iphones and you can password protect the system and each member can control their own monitor mix with their iphone without accidently effecting any other aux sends or channel sends. You can carry the ipad and run sound from anywhere in the room. Also you don't need any outboard gear with it. You just plug the outputs into your amp rack or powered speakers. It has compression and effects for each of the 16 channels Yee Haw!

Its definitely the way of the future. Best thing for the sound man is that he can walk around the house and check the mix, not just judge by where the main board is set up.

Allow me to be the fly in the ointment.

Higher technology often = greater fail rate.
................................. or ..............................................
Never had the battery run down on my Philips screw driver.



If you get my drift . . . .

We have used digital mixers twice when my friend Barry was with us. He always buys the latest gear. Several years ago when I bought the Allen and Heath mixer Barry was leaving and he wanted me to buy his Yamaha digital mixer. He would have sold it to me for what I paid for the Allen and Heath. I didn't do it because it wasn't user friendly. I believe this unit is user friendly and actually easier to use than my current mixer. Both times we used digital mixing consoles they proved to be just as reliable as an analog unit.

The great thing about a digital mixer is that you can program in 'scenes', so just click a button and you are preset for THIS singer or THAT lead guitar part, etc.

GuitarMikeB wrote:The great thing about a digital mixer is that you can program in 'scenes', so just click a button and you are preset for THIS singer or THAT lead guitar part, etc.

Yep. This is an underused feature but if you get a good mix that is really working, save the scene. Next gig with the same players, set gain levels and recall your mix scene. All the faders, eq, compression, delay, reverb and monitor settings are instantly in place so getting a good mix takes 1 minute. Now fine tune it for the room and you are rocking!

As far as reliability goes, anything is possible but Apple and Mackie have both demonstrated high reliability with their products for a very long time. The ipad seems pretty bulletproof.

GuitarMikeB wrote:The great thing about a digital mixer is that you can program in 'scenes', so just click a button and you are preset for THIS singer or THAT lead guitar part, etc.

That's pretty cool right there . . .