New Mackie digital mixer

[Reson8tor]

AH, you keep hammering those points home, and nobody is disagreeing with you in the context of what you're talking about.

 

But as interesting and useful as all that information is, it has nothing to do with this new Mackie mixer (a point that some of us keep trying to make here, but it keeps getting buried).

 

Wireless control is an option, and it won't even work out of the box (you need to add your own router). It's just a new little digital mixer with a limited channel count, designed for the weekend warrior, and using an iPad to save money on a touchscreen interface.

 

Unless the designers at Mackie have completely lost it, the mixer will still function and pass audio with your current settings, if you lose signal while you're out mixing the crowd. You just go back to the mixer, re-attach the iPod to the dock, and nothing changes in the sound going out to the audience. This remains to be seen, of course, since the thing isn't out yet, but they'd be nuts not to build it this way.

 

It's simply not a mixer that relies on wireless to function, so all of these excellent comments about the reliability of wireless systems for passing audio, or critical FOH control when that's the only way the system can work, are just not all that relevant, in my opinion. Assuming this thing works the way we think it works, and I'm looking forward to hearing the first user reports.

[StratGuy22]

@ Stratguy22 about the Toaster... Wow. That's a blast from the past. I'm hoping you didn't hang through the progression of the Toaster folks into the Play days and get one of those horrid Trinity Broadcasters. What a fiasco that was, and no amount of Kinki Stockrammer's glib blatherings could offset the never ending flood of issues that came along for the ride. I was vaguely around the perimeter of that stuff as I was an ElectricImage beta tester prior to play's acquiring EI. It was all downhill from there afterward.

 

 

I went to a demo of the trinity, but never got into it. To me it just seemed like nothing but fade after fade. Some nice looking ones, but u just found them all cheesy. I had all but forgotten about Kiki I remember paying $2500 each for a pair of 4GB Barricuda hard drives, and that was considered a good price, since not too long before storage space ran about a buck a meg.

 

Lol now I hand out a set of recorded tracks, and the 4GB USB drive costs me around $6.

 

 

Crazy!!!

 

 

I really liked the Storyboard editing, I still have my toaster/flyer setup in the garage somewhere. I just can't seem to part with it, even thought its been a good 8 years since I set it up!

[Mutha Goose]

 

Certainly, some markets are more tolerant of glitches and problems and some are not. Some involve faster moving paces, deeper scope and broader requirements. The market that I work in (and some others here) is not nearly as fault tolerant, otherwise I wouldn't spend as much as I do specifically for reliability over feature set.

 

 

Again, it is no longer uncommon to find iPads in remote mixing application at stadium and network broadcast events. I've been reading interviews with more and more A-Level engineers preaching the benefits they are finding by using them (and a few mentioning the geek factor).

[agedhorse]

Certainly, I understand.

[LewnWorx]

 

I remember paying $2500 each for a pair of 4GB Barricuda hard drives, and that was considered a good price, since not too long before storage space ran about a buck a meg.

 

 

Oh yeah, those were scary days. Being mac based, I made the mistake of trying to leverage the one and only product that took advantage of the Quadra 840AV's Composite I/O Video Cards daughterboard edge connector. It was a variant of the VideoSpigot family and was horrifically buggy, as in "how the hell did this get released as a shipping product" buggy. It wasn't even Alpha at release. And yeah, I dumped 5K into my pair of Barracudas (which were also flaky) and another $1200 for a Raid 0 SCSI enclosure (and SCSI was flaky as well). This was pre FCP days so all you had was the only marginally more stable Premiere to work with..

 

Course it's all relative. Prior to that I had a Mac IIx, mainly to be able to load multiple Radius Rocket boards into to run multiple EI Cameras on, but once you had your frames rendered, the IIFX firmware was incompatible with the TruVision output card and Diaquest SONY VTR controller board, so I had to ditch the IIX for a IICI, lose 3 of my Rockets (also flaky as hell) to be able to run the TruVision/Diaquest combo to output animations 1 frame at a time with a 20 seconds pre and post preroll on the Betacam deck. It'd take 3 hours to spool off a 25 second animation at NTSC D1. All these little bitty, underfunded and under engineered companies turning out all these flaky products. IF AH had lived through those years he'd have had a coronary on the spot. Looking back, even the worst Behringer products would have looked like SSL and Midas stuff in comparison. It really was that bad. Don't miss those years at all.

[StratGuy22]

Oh yeah, those were scary days. Being mac based, I made the mistake of trying to leverage the one and only product that took advantage of the Quadra 840AV's Composite I/O Video Cards daughterboard edge connector. It was a variant of the VideoSpigot family and was horrifically buggy, as in "how the hell did this get released as a shipping product" buggy. It wasn't even Alpha at release. And yeah, I dumped 5K into my pair of Barracudas (which were also flaky) and another $1200 for a Raid 0 SCSI enclosure (and SCSI was flaky as well). This was pre FCP days so all you had was the only marginally more stable Premiere to work with.. Course it's all relative. Prior to that I had a Mac IIx, mainly to be able to load multiple Radius Rocket boards into to run multiple EI Cameras on, but once you had your frames rendered, the IIFX firmware was incompatible with the TruVision output card and Diaquest SONY VTR controller board, so I had to ditch the IIX for a IICI, lose 3 of my Rockets (also flaky as hell) to be able to run the TruVision/Diaquest combo to output animations 1 frame at a time with a 20 seconds pre and post preroll on the Betacam deck. It'd take 3 hours to spool off a 25 second animation at NTSC D1. All these little bitty, underfunded and under engineered companies turning out all these flaky products. IF AH had lived through those years he'd have had a coronary on the spot. Looking back, even the worst Behringer products would have looked like SSL and Midas stuff in comparison. It really was that bad. Don't miss those years at all.

 

And now, 8 year olds drag & drop with an ease we couldn't have imagined! I remember with light wave, the Raptors were the big dogs, I bet my iPhone 4s has more horsepower.

 

[LewnWorx]

And now, 8 year olds drag & drop with an ease we couldn't have imagined! I remember with light wave, the Raptors were the big dogs, I bet my iPhone 4s has more horsepower.

 

We keep this {censored} up too much longer and it'll devolve down into:

 

"You damn kids. You think you have it so hard. Back when I was your age we had to string together a couple orange juice cans with twine because we couldn't afford a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem and push the bits manually with our fingers up hill both ways through 5' of snow."

 

[Randyman]

LewnWorx wrote:

 

All these little bitty, underfunded and under engineered companies turning out all these flaky products. IF AH had lived through those years he'd have had a coronary on the spot. Looking back, even the worst Behringer products would have looked like SSL and Midas stuff in comparison. It really was that bad. Don't miss those years at all.

 

 

Yeah, all of the above, plus the horse power of the Macs of that era were pathetic. I walked away from DTP and using my Mac for audio recording in the late 80's- had an aversion to computers for a long time! Slow and buggy and pricey!

[StratGuy22]

Back then I was all about the Amiga.