Can anyone help me choose a mixer please?

[JustinM]

Hey everyone! Well I'm looking into buying a mixer, and I was wondering if you could help me choose which one will be right for me. I was looking at the Mackie 1402- VLZ Pro compact, Yamaha MX 12/4 and the Alesis Studio 24. I'm looking for one that will be used mostly for live perfomances, but can also be used for recording. Would one of the mixers I mentioned work okay for those purposes? Do you recommend any others in the $400 through $600 dollar price range? Thanks alot for your help.
- Justin

 

[vox]

I'm not familiar with the Yamaha, but between the Alesis and the Mackie, I would go with the Mackie.

Alesis makes great value for money equipment that usually sounds pretty good and has a lot of nice features, however I have always found that the area that they choose to cut corners to keep cost down has always been in physical durability. Their stuff works great, just don't rough it up too much cause it'll break.
You say that you want a board for live gigs that can also record well, I think these are the two areas where the Mackies are best, they are tough little boards that handle the road pretty well and they have nice preamps which are good enough for recording.

P.S To be fair i must say that i havent actually used one of the Alesis boards, my comments were based on my experience with their other products.

 

[RWhite]

I have a Alesis Studio 32 and like it a lot. However if you will be doing mostly live music I agree that in your price range a Mackie would be the best choice, durable and good (for the price) mic preamps (in the opinion of many but not all)

 

[Tekker]

Would you guys say that the Alesis is better than the Mackie for recording?

 

[OldGrover]

You could also do what I did - buy used Mackie mixer. I got a 1604 and I'm very pleased with it - and I paid less then I would have for a 1202 VLZ Pro... I get great flexibility at the cost of not getting the better preamps, though (VLZ apparently has better preamps, I find the ones I'm using right now satisfactorily clean, though not pantswettingly so). I figure I'll be buying nice preamps along the way, so spending money on stuff that I'll be replacing soon didn't make sense. And the 1604 is very robust, so you can be pretty sure that it survived the use of whoever you get it from , if you get it used.

 

[vox]

The Mackie Preamps get a lot of good reviews (I have a Mackie and I love em too), I have not heard this kind of thing about the Alesis Pres, On the other hand I haven't heard a single bad review either, this indicates that the Alesis is probably a good solid board that does it's job well but doesnt have any 'Jaw Dropping' qualities.

I do believe however that the Alesis is a traditional 'Inline' studio board with Tape Returns on each channel, this will give you some more flexibility and options when recording.

To sum up, my feeling is that the Mackie is a better 'road' board. I think the Mackie preamps are probably a little better than the Alesis. The Alesis wins in terms of studio signal routing and flexibility.