P
plexi59
Guest
The FireWire option card in my Mackie ONYX 1220 kicked the bucket, and a couple of pots are scratchy, so I started looking into a replacement.
Much to my surprise I discovered that nobody (and that includes Mackie) seems to actually make anything that's reasonably priced and offers the same functionality. By "the same" functionality I mean a decent mixer with a decent multichannel recording interface built right in. Nowadays it looks like you either get a shitty 2x2 USB interface in a mixer (and they hide the specs for that interface really well, because it's often 16bit 41KHz, basically bottom of the barrel converters), or you get a fully analog mixer and then spend a ton of cash on the actual standalone interface (with a side effect of a rat's nest of wires). I mean I get why you'd want to do that in an actual high end studio, sure, but for a hobbyist like me this is just dumb. Audient id22 looked interesting, but I can't tell from the specs if it even works without a computer. It certainly requires the computer for adjusting the parameters. I don't want to have to fire up a computer every time I want to play.
And interfaces are equally idiotic. You either get decidedly low-end USB2 stuff of questionable quality, or you have to get Thunderbolt stuff for which there are several incompatible versions, and which starts at $500 for just a couple of channels. I mean, really? The very highest end ADCs and DACs TI (aka "Burr-Brown") makes are like $12 per stereo pair. Cirrus, the same. Why is that interface $2K? I mean I get why Axe FX costs as much as it does: there's a lot of software in there, and software is expensive, but there's very little software in an interface, and in case of e.g. Universal Audio you have to pay hundreds of dollars for it separately. Another explanation could be that they're very low volume manufacturers, of course. As I was looking at this stuff, I was thinking "man, Fractal could build this blindfolded; the problem that's being solved here is markedly easier than guitar input stage which is subjected to crazy levels of gain, which magnifies noise".
So I ended up just getting a used FireWire Mackie (a newer version) for like a hundred bucks. Congratulations, mixer manufacturers, you've played yourself. The budget was $500 or maybe a little over.
Much to my surprise I discovered that nobody (and that includes Mackie) seems to actually make anything that's reasonably priced and offers the same functionality. By "the same" functionality I mean a decent mixer with a decent multichannel recording interface built right in. Nowadays it looks like you either get a shitty 2x2 USB interface in a mixer (and they hide the specs for that interface really well, because it's often 16bit 41KHz, basically bottom of the barrel converters), or you get a fully analog mixer and then spend a ton of cash on the actual standalone interface (with a side effect of a rat's nest of wires). I mean I get why you'd want to do that in an actual high end studio, sure, but for a hobbyist like me this is just dumb. Audient id22 looked interesting, but I can't tell from the specs if it even works without a computer. It certainly requires the computer for adjusting the parameters. I don't want to have to fire up a computer every time I want to play.
And interfaces are equally idiotic. You either get decidedly low-end USB2 stuff of questionable quality, or you have to get Thunderbolt stuff for which there are several incompatible versions, and which starts at $500 for just a couple of channels. I mean, really? The very highest end ADCs and DACs TI (aka "Burr-Brown") makes are like $12 per stereo pair. Cirrus, the same. Why is that interface $2K? I mean I get why Axe FX costs as much as it does: there's a lot of software in there, and software is expensive, but there's very little software in an interface, and in case of e.g. Universal Audio you have to pay hundreds of dollars for it separately. Another explanation could be that they're very low volume manufacturers, of course. As I was looking at this stuff, I was thinking "man, Fractal could build this blindfolded; the problem that's being solved here is markedly easier than guitar input stage which is subjected to crazy levels of gain, which magnifies noise".
So I ended up just getting a used FireWire Mackie (a newer version) for like a hundred bucks. Congratulations, mixer manufacturers, you've played yourself. The budget was $500 or maybe a little over.
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