So last year I purchased a Mackie 32 - 8 for tracking and mixing, and overall I'm pretty happy with it.

This is the only console I've ever tracked on, but I have used an La-610, a great river me-1nv, and a golden age pre 73. sonically i don't hear much of a difference between the preamps just mentioned and the pre's in my Mackie 32 8.

Why is the mackie so hated? Am I just that bad of an engineer that I dont hear the differences between such holy preamps and my mackie?

I'd like to hear opinions from those of you that have tracked on a 32-8 as well as other consoles and outboard gear and your experiences with both.

Preamp Post-mortem | Sound On Sound

I don't hate the sound of the Mackie 8-bus, but I think it's small-sounding and the monitor section imparts this slightly distorted upper-mid "squinch" that isn't actually there in the program material.

What I hate about them is they're just about impossible to clean. Between the faders and the buttons and the pots and the jacks, there's a lot that's going to get dirty and oxidized. To clean or otherwise service an 8-bus you have to flip it over and almost completely dismantle it.

I had one for few years when everyone had one or few ADATs. It's a very good mixer for its price. It sounds pretty good and you can easily get a good result (probably better than ITB). The micpreamp is good if you use the direct out. It's clean, decent but a bit dry sounding and a bit grey sounding on the hi to my ears, not as clean or extended as something like Earthworks, John Hardy pres. Though I'd be surprised that you don't hear much of a difference between 73 and Mackie 8 BUS…... The EQ is fine, not great but nothing really to complain. The major problem is the headroom is a bit lower (for the price I guess it's pretty good). However I sold mine because I wanted to save space.

Why is the mackie so hated? Probably because it's popular and it's popular to hate the same thing?

Necro thread.

Heard a mix the other day of the Toft ATB (a fairly recent inline desk for ~10k) and a Mackie 32 8 bus on Youtube. I believe that the guy did his best on both mixes. Anyway, the Mackie mix for me (and many others), was far superior. I was shocked to be honest.

The Toft by comparison was blurry and really muddy. Didn't care for it at all.

Imo...the Mackie (with meter bridge) is a serious best deal at the moment. 32 channels, inline, decent eq (yes I think the eq isn't bad). People are asking crazy amounts for the Toft and the Mackie offers similar facilities.

The Mackie 32 8 is laid out nicely, inline and built tough as per the contractor notes. Imo what comes out of it, is up to the user.

Again...a serious best deal imo. Try and find a comparable 32 channel inline desk for under 10k. You won't.

Never mind one that sounds pretty decent.

Do you have a link to that? I've never worked on a Toft but was always curious about them. There was a lot of buzz when they first came out, not much since.

The 8-bus still gets the job done; just getting harder to find one with everything working.

Here's the video. The comparison mixes are about 3/4 of the way through. For me, the Mackie kills the Toft.


The 8 buss is mostly through hole (not as much surface mount) which is good too, repair wise imo. Also, the ribbon cables are socketed and current schematics available.

Yeah, finding one in good shape with a meter bridge is probably a little more difficult.

The thing about the Mackie is that it doesn't deal all that well with transients. If you can keep the signal lower on tracking, to deal with the trasients a little better, it doesn't sound so bad. They are great to learn on.

The routing scheme is pretty classic, so once you can get around on an 8-bus you'll be able to figure out most other analog consoles pretty easily.

Indeed.

Everything that I've heard through one has sounded pretty decent...including kick and snare hits. But I haven't really worked on one at all. I haven't heard anything tho, that I thought sounded bad or muddy or weird on any finished mix's that I've heard.

Imo, pound for pound, if someone is looking for a decent sounding recording desk on a budget...the Mackie still presents a pretty solid solution. Especially considering the current prices...vs competition.

Anything with comparable facilities, is 100x the price...and from what I've heard thus far, may even sound worse.

I tried the eq and thought it was quite subtle and not bad. Didn't seem obnoxious or harsh. They seem built well and are light for servicing, full schematics are available. They seem like a great deal...

I feel the need to add, though, that in that shootout with the Toft, the Mackie sounds pretty much like I'd expect. But the Toft sounds extraordinarily bad. Like there's something really wrong with it.

Well, for the mix comparison I would think his desk should be working as it should. I almost 'had' to believe it must be broken or something because the sound was so brutal... muddy and indistinct. Again imo. But I don't know...maybe it was broken and he didn't know it? Guess we'll never know.

Ah yes, The Eight-Buss ribbon cables.
I have a 24-8 pretty much free looking for a good home. 'Ribbons done along the way for what that might be worth.
99% working when I retired it*
I especially liked the Mix-B feature -stereo band phones so much more fun than mono aux'. *Also it's going 'wonky in the middle of a session exactly what prompted moving on.

I read a tech guy that mentioned they weren't all that bad to work on. The 4 bus Mackie and quite a few other type desks have the ribbon cables soldered in, so working on them is that much harder if you have to start desoldering cables. The 8 bus has the cables all socketed...so they're easier to dismantle for servicing if need be. They're also fairly light.

From what I've read generally, these desks seem to hold up pretty good. I think they're far undervalued tbh.

IDK, not that I know anything about the Toft, kind'a not buying the premise. (conclusion) The board would have to be an incompetent build. I'd bet '99% it's in the mixes...

Everybody knows how inconclusive youtube video's are...but, I'll leave the results up for debate.

No argument here. The things were ground breaking incredible values. I went from a Tascam 312b to the 8-buss and it served wonderfully for years! What Greg Mackie did for us was huge

I used a 32-8 for a decade of almost daily sessions. I loved the routing. It was very flexible. I bought it new. I used it with 24 tracks of adat then with an HD24.
The ribbon cables started going out immediately. I drove to the Mackie factory, outside of Seattle, dropped off the board, rented a hotel room, and picked it up the next day. The new ribbons lasted about 6 months before they started to fail again. I got another set and replaced them myself and put a dab of silicon on the connections. By then they had sourced the correct connectors on the ribbons. They lasted for a couple of years but also started to fail.

If I soloed a channel it sounded fine but when I summed 24 tracks, plus another 8 channels of effects returns it was like driving a nail through my ears. Very brittle and harsh. Several other people were engineering so it wasn't my mix skills that was the reason for the harshness. if you listen to a 1604 you'll hear the same harsh quality.

Finally I replaced the 32-8 with a Soundcraft 32 gb8 and a couple of Focusrite isa 1s and I have a smile on my face.

Interesting. So far...all the 32 8 stuff that I've heard hasn't sounded terribly bad. Thanks for chiming in!

Back in the ADAT days, the original, American made, Mackie 8 bus and 1604 were built like tanks. As long as you didn’t push them, they sounded really good. They were everywhere at the start of the home studio revolution.

Until recently, I could have shown you the same material ITB and also split out to analog channels and summed with an 8 bus. I wish I still could. I bet someone on GS can.

Well, if that mix comparison is any indication of what the Toft sounds like, I much prefer the Mackie....and people are asking 10k for the Toft.

Also, last night I found another thread on GS where quite a few guys were mentioning some good recordings, even award winning recordings done on the 32-8. Others had some negative things to say about the chips used in them, etc. From what I've read and heard so far, it appears decent recordings can be made on them.

Around 1997, I had a Mackie 24/8 bus, it was a fine mixer and incredible value for the money. Mackies were derided by many professionals, even back then, but I could never find fault with mine, even after upgrading to expensive preamps and other outboard gear, my Mackie always sounded great to me.

I eventually replaced the Mackie with a Sony dmxr100, an even finer mixer (with a price tag to reflect) that lasted with me only about 4 or 5 years, thanks in great part to Sony’s discontinuation of the product and lack of support for its pro division.

Since then, it’s been itb for me, happily so. (with a fair degree of outboard, mostly guitar pedals these days).

That mix is what the Toft sounds like slammed into oblivion. It doesn't have the headroom (like an API etc.) to push it like that. The video is a joke.

In the late 90's, I reverted to a Mackie 24-4 for a few years, just to put together an inexpensive home studio. I'd been working for years on large boards; TAC, Sony, SSL, API, Trident, Harrison, etc... and the Mackie sounded just fine, to my ears, FWIW. I did some of my favorite recordings for myself and other clients in those years, recordings that still stand tall today, IMO. That old SOS article is... telling.

I agree with those who have fancy preamps and etc, the Mackie still sounds fine to me too.

I currently keep the smallest one, a little 402 VLZ4 around, for a little "mackie love."

I may be misremembering, but I don't think the 8-bus consoles have the VLZ preamps.

FWIW, I stopped using 8-buses regularly when I moved out of my fourwall (with the non-removable 8-bus). I still have a couple of those same pres built into the backside of my HUI, but I don't use them.

No, I don't think so. But I was reading a few posts with guys that found them usable. One guy apparently...a professional drummer had a collection of the usual expensive preamps, and didn't find all that much of a difference over the Mackie. He ended up tracking the whole record (drums, etc) through the 8 bus, and apparently it sounds quite good.

Having done it, I will say that if you track and mix a whole project through an 8-bus you'll get a very consistent sound. It'll put its stamp on your record. And you won't have to deal with the "oil and water" issues that a lot of us have to contend with when we're mixing something that came from 10 different basements, bedrooms and garages.