Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

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nomadjames
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Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

Post by nomadjames »

I won a Mackie 16.8.2 at an auction from a local radio station. Just wondering what anyone who has used it thinks about these? I would love to find the 24E expander for it, they're getting hard to find.

I haven't been able to set it up, it's too big for the room I use at this house...Can't wait to get dubby.
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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

Post by WOLF! »

It's from a time that many producers used Mackie or either Soundcraft (Ghost).
Mackie has that typical gain distortion that give character to lots of hardcore records.
youtu.be/YMnHiUnJ0Mc

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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

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Yeah, I know that Mackie was popular with the DnB guys that were using Akai/Emu samplers. Wasn't sure which series was used more, this one or the one after it with less busses.

It has tape send/return per channel on it, hoping I can track through it into my audio interface.
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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

Post by WOLF! »

Put your fx units returns on channels so you can eq them and feed them to other fx via the sends.
Maybe it can be handy to install a patchbay because you 'only' have 16 channels and with the fx returns on separate channels you can run out of channels quickly.

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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

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I was planning on setting up a patchbay with it when it was permanently installed.
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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

Post by innovine »

I've a 32:8 (and an emu and an s950) which I use quite a lot for techstep and dnb. It's a kind of shitty mixer, really noisy and the eq's are nasty. Loads of great routing options though, and it works great together with a multitrack recorder. I use mine as a live mixer though since my multitracking is done in a digital mixer. as you probably know already, just upping the gains on the inputs is great and you get that instant 90s vibe. I don't really use it for anything else though. I got the whole thing for the price of a dist pedal, so why not. It takes up a whole lot of room, and the power supply is so noisy I drilled a hole through the wall and put it in the garage. be prepared to take it apart and clean the contacts on the ribbon cables between the boards, the old units get crackly and noisy due to the ribbon cable contacts going bad, and theyeget sold off as its too time consuming to be worth a professional clean... Bit of isopropylalcohol on them, and some cleaning of the pots and faders and you'll be good to go.

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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

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innovine wrote:I've a 32:8 (and an emu and an s950) which I use quite a lot for techstep and dnb. It's a kind of shitty mixer, really noisy and the eq's are nasty. Loads of great routing options though, and it works great together with a multitrack recorder. I use mine as a live mixer though since my multitracking is done in a digital mixer. as you probably know already, just upping the gains on the inputs is great and you get that instant 90s vibe. I don't really use it for anything else though. I got the whole thing for the price of a dist pedal, so why not. It takes up a whole lot of room, and the power supply is so noisy I drilled a hole through the wall and put it in the garage. be prepared to take it apart and clean the contacts on the ribbon cables between the boards, the old units get crackly and noisy due to the ribbon cable contacts going bad, and theyeget sold off as its too time consuming to be worth a professional clean... Bit of isopropylalcohol on them, and some cleaning of the pots and faders and you'll be good to go.
My buddy has the same one, and he described it the same way; "the nosiest fuckin' mixer I've ever heard!" I guess that's why the power supply has a 20 foot lead on it. I'm hoping it is well maintained as it came out of one of the major radio stations around here.
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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

Post by nomadjames »

WOLF!: That video was fucking great man!

I learned how to write music on The Grid over a Dogonacid...I thought I had seen every single possible video on this topic, ever...But I didn't see this one...Great stuff.

Anybody know anything about patchbays? I definitely want to utilize the best patching situation I can...Still kind of wrapping my head around how I am going to execute.
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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

Post by innovine »

There have been several good threads written here about setting up patch bays. Do some searching.

In summary, be prepared to get it wrong a few times. Don't underestimate how good normalization is. Label all the sockets on the front side, AND the cables coming up to the back side.. you'll be rewiring the back as much as the front while you get yourself settled in.

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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

Post by Mattias »

Yeah loads of people used these but mostly the 4 bus version
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Re: Any of you guys familiar with the Mackie 8 bus mixers?

Post by nomadjames »

Innovine: I found the patchbay thread you were in from 2016 and bumped it because I'm a prick. Good stuff there, OP in that thread is using the same interface as me. I'm hoping when I buy the 8 channel preamp, i can run all 16 outs to the mixer as needed. Wouldn't need that much, but would be good. Then I could run the tape out per channel into the 16 ins and use it to track, then have everything else ready to go, except for my Reverb and Delay, which would permanently be wired to the first two sends. It's just difficult to get my head around all the new routing possibilities, having never done it before.

Mattias: I believe that the 8 bus series is a lot older than the more common 4 bus ones that came out.
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