what else does a Mackie ONYX do??

[RoOkiE85]

i know that a makie onyx mixes but what other options does it do and can do??

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

i know that a makie onyx mixes but what other options does it do and can do??

A standard Mackie Onyx is an analog mixer; nothing more, nothing less. The two things that set it apart (more or less) from other standard analog mixers are the quality of it's mic preamps and the fact that it has a FireWire connection option.

The Onyx preamps, though still not in the same league as top shelf stand-alone mic preamps, are a notch above the preamps found in most project mixers and better than the preamps in older Mackie designs. Hard to find better integrated preamps in the price range.

But the "big" thing (at least if you buy into the hype) about the Onyx series is that if you want to spend an extra $400 above the regular price of the mixer, you can get a FireWire I/O option added to it. This FW I/O allows you to plug the mixer directly into a FW port on your PC. Through this port you can send up to 16 input channels and one stereo bus directly to your PC. You can also send one stereo mix bus back out the PC to the mixe for headphone or monitor feeds of you computer mix.

Keep in mind that the Onyx is not a DAW controller, however. It cannot control your software or affect your audio signals once they are in the computer. It is simply an outboard analog mixer with an optional digital converter that allows you convert your audio to digital and record it directly into your PC via a FireWire connection.

HTH,

G.

P.S. This information is all available in any published product description of the Onyx series mixers. This is only a forum translation of what's already there.

 

[travelin travis]

I wonder how good the converters are..............

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

I wonder how good the converters are..............

I've only shortly palyed with an Onyx/FW for a few minutes in a showroom with less-than-known-or-controlled conditions in a less-than-studio environment so I can't give an authorative answer to that.

But my "feeling" (for what that's worth) is that if you were to rate converter quality on an arbitrary scale of 1-10 with a Soundblaster card being a 1, the MOTU 2408 being a 5, and an Apogee AD-16X being a 10, the Onyx would probably be somewhere around a 4.5+. Not sure if it's as good as the MOTU, but it's not that far off if it isn't. Again this was not a scientific test by any wild stretch.

G.

 

[bleyrad]

I think the Onyx A/D is very good, surprisingly so, but the D/A is surprisingly bad.
So in order to accurately judge the A/D you need to be monitoring out a known good DAC.