Mackie Onyx 4880 48 Channel Mixer

Mackie Onyx 4880 48 Channel Mixer

When it comes to live sound, the margin for error is tight. Nobody knows this better than regional sound professionals, medium-sized venues, and houses of worship. Unlike the major touring and live sound companies, these hardy folks must make a difficult choice when buying a live sound console; it’s the age-old tradeoff between channel count and sound quality. Pay for quality, and you have to find some way to cram all your mics and instruments into 16 or fewer inputs. Go cheapo, and you know it’s only a matter of when—not if—the console fails at some crucial moment.

As of today, that age-old tradeoff has gone the way of grunge and dial-up modems. Introducing the new Onyx 80 Series 2480, 3280, 4080 and 4880 Premium Live Sound Consoles—the best value in the history of live sound—from Mackie, of course.

A NO-COMPROMISE DESIGN
Priority one for the Onyx 80 Series was to create a live sound console that made absolutely no sacrifice in sonic integrity at any stage of the design. So the Onyx 80 Series engineers started with the highest quality analog components available—from premium op-amps to IC chips costing exponentially more than previous designs. By utilizing semi-discrete eight channel modular circuit boards, the Onyx series combine the flexibility of single PCBs for each channel, with the cost advantages and minimal cabling of large-scale integrated circuit boards.

No corners were cut; Every Subgroup, Left, Right and Center main bus is electronically balanced for an uncompromised signal from input to output. All-new summing bus circuitry was designed from the ground up to maximize master section headroom, while minimizing noise and crosstalk. And most notably, Mackie developed premium Onyx mic preamps and Perkins EQ circuitry specifically for optimum performance within the total Onyx system.

Mackie also went overboard on the "toughness" factor, even by Mackie standards, building the Onyx 80 chassis with beefy aluminum extrusions and steel bulkheads for over-the-top physical protection of the technology inside.

ONYX MIC PREAMPS
Creating Mackie's flagship Onyx mic preamps presented a unique challenge. On one hand, they wanted to deliver traits more commonly associated with boutique studio mic preamps: a tight, focused high end, superior ambience retrieval, detailed lower bass octaves, and highly textural midrange—no matter what you plug in. On the other hand, Mackie knew Onyx mic preamps would have to function in the real world of live performance, which often includes high levels of radio frequency and microwave energy, long cable runs and the occasional “hot-patched” cable.

The analog engineering staff at Mackie is always ready to sink its teeth into a juicy design problem. The challenge for the Onyx mic preamp was to build upon the already-impressive XDR design, improving its overall dynamic range and RFI rejection. This was accomplished by re-working the mic preamp circuitry and specifying custom high-performance IC chips developed expressly for low-noise, high-headroom audio. The end result is a level of transparency, fidelity and headroom on par with expensive standalone pres.

Specifically, Onyx mic preamps deliver outstanding, verifiable specs like 123dB total dynamic range, -129 dBm Equivalent Input Noise, and 0.0007% Total Harmonic Distortion — for real. Their superior design also addresses problematic issues like input impedance and linearity, maximum input level handling at low gain settings, shielding and grounding effectiveness, overload recovery, and radio frequency interference. And because Onyx mic preamps are designed for use at "real world" gain settings, they'll easily handle anything from +22 dB line level down to microvolt-level signals from a ribbon mic, without adding noise.

Onyx 80 Series consoles offer individually switchable, true 48v phantom power on every preamp. That's because, despite the widely held notion that dynamic microphones don't "see" phantom power, the presence of phantom p