Mackie Designs Ships New Digital 8-Bus Mixing Console

July 10, 1998 -- Mackie Designs Inc. announced June 30, 1998, shipment of their newest product, the Mackie Digital 8-Bus mixing console. The Digital 8-Bus is a 56-Input, 72-Channel, fully automated, digital mixer designed for professional music, sound-for-picture, and installed live applications. The new Digital 8-Bus rivals mega-consoles costing much, much more and has been greatly anticipated by the professional audio community since it's introduction at industry trade shows last year. Mackie began shipping the product from it's Woodinville manufacturing facility June 30. The highly acclaimed console is being featured at the Summer NAMM show in Nashville July 10-12.

"When Greg Mackie put together the D8B team, he gave us a deceptively simple goal, do digital right," stated Bob Tudor lead designer and senior programmer for the Mackie Digital Division. Tudor further commented, "In other words, he asked us to create a digital console that's as intuitive and easy to use as our analog consoles. A console that doesn't compromise headroom, noise floor, bandwidth, or color the sound in any way. And then, make it an incredibly good value! Needless to say, that took a little longer than we thought it would. But we think you'll agree this console is worth the wait."

The Mackie Digital 8-Bus is a fully automated, 56-input, 72-channel, 8 bus digital console-with an analog feel-and analog features such as full meter bridge, trim control, mic/line switch, mute, solo, and 100mm motorized faders. These are individual controls, not multifunction buttons or pages on a screen. The "V-Pot" and "V-Strip" give rotary control with single button push accessibility to aux sends and pan-12 aux sends and pan on all 48 channels. With an abundance of DSP horsepower, the D8B offers 4 band parametric EQ, compression, and gating on 48 channels. The EQ, dynamics, and 2 on-board global effects (expandable to 8 stereo effects) are controlled from rotary controls in the "Fat Channel." A true 56 input, 8 Bus digital console with 24 bit main outputs.

The D8B runs on Mackie's exclusive Real Time Operating System enabling the console to integrate into any existing system. The D8B also utilizes a true workstation-class 32-bit Pentium Compatible CPU Processor. Besides riding herd over 48 tracks of audio, the CPU can perform true computer operations like reading and writing to floppy and hard drives and powering full-color monitors up to 21" via a built-in SVGA Video Port. You can even add a PC-compatible keyboard and PS/2(tm) mouse.

The D8B boasts over a TeraFlop of instructions per second (Three Billion instructions per second!). Mixers ten times the cost of the D8B don't have this kind of brutish digital muscle. This horsepower enables the console to run digital functions such as EQ, gating and compression on forty-eight simultaneous channels. The board can be also expanded via optional analog and digital I/O cards and DSP capabilities can be expanded by adding third-party software plug-ins.

The Mackie Digital 8-Bus also features both 5.1 and 7.1 Surround-Sound capabilities (actually from 2 to 8 speakers in several configurations) in a user-adjustable 3-D graphic floating window. Industry standard 5.1 configures five output channels, Left/Front and Right/Front, Left/Back and Right/Back, and Subwoofer/Center. The 7.1 configuration adds a pair of Left and Right Center speakers to the five. A green ball, found at the center of the graphics window, represents a visual cue in which users can move off the "sweet spot" (center), toward or away from the designated speakers, moving around the grid.

The Surround-Sound window also includes 'Morph' time-based features. Morphing moves the sound center between point A and point B over a specified time length.

Bob Tudor further added, "We think we did our first digital mixer right. We listened to users, got the best engineers, and hammered away at a design that was never compromised. With the D8B, we think Mackie has created the most powerful digital mixer made-period."

A partial sampling of the Mackie Digital 8-Bus feature set includes:

72+ channels via bank switching
Full Automation of all Volume, Pan, Mute, and Effect parameters
Mackie's Lightning Fast Real Time OS
12 studio-grade mic preamps (expandable to 44)
12 aux sends per channel
25 100mm motorized faders
V-Pot(tm) virtual rotary controls
Built-in multifunction meter bridge
Built-in digital patch bay
On-board CPU and SVGA video output
32-bit internal processing
24-bit 128x oversampling A/D & D/A on all channels
Simultaneous digital parametric EQ, Gates and Compressors on all 48 channels
Built-in hard disk, "floppy" disk drive and Ethernet connection
Dynamic & scene (snapshot) automation
Quad 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound capabilities
Open architecture for easy-to-install plug-in FX & I/O cards
Apogee UV22 Super CD Encoding

The Mackie Digital 8-Bus is available in flexible configurations to fit several applications. The D8B can be configured with up to 24 tracks of analog tape inputs/outputs or Apogee-engineered ADAT®/TDIF digital inputs/outputs. Analog submix bus outputs plus 2-track S/PDIF + AES/EBU digital I/O come standard with all configurations.

NOTE: "Mackie." and the "Running Man" figure are registered trademarks of Mackie Designs Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

For more information, visit their web site at www.mackie.com.