Mackie 24-8 distortion on the bus outs

seldomfed · Post by **seldomfed** » 25 Nov 2002 12:07 pm

Perhaps a strange question here but there's lots of experts out there. PA and studio.

Anyone experience problems with a Mackie 8bus board causing distorion when routing signals to bus outs? Direct outs work fine, solo fine, but rout to a bus and intermittent distortion and signal loss occur. Dirt?, IC's going out?

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Chris Kennison
Ft. Collins, Colorado
"There is no spoon"
www.seldomfed.com

Mark van Allen · Post by **Mark van Allen** » 1 Dec 2002 12:27 pm

I had a Behringer 24-8 Mackie clone for some time, before I went to my current digital setup. It sounds like you may have a bad summing amp in the buss summing system- as long as all your gain staging is ok, not overloading at one of the inputs, I can't think of what else that might be. Try routing a sine wave input through the same setup you're using to see if you still get distortion. Good luck...

seldomfed · Post by **seldomfed** » 2 Dec 2002 11:29 am

Mark,
thanks, the board's going in for service, I believe your diagnosis is near the mark - the board's been installed in my studio for at least 6 years, the gain structuring is correct, the problem has never occured until just recently. I thought it was the inserts and/or patch bay so cleaned all cables and got a new patch bay - problem still there. The direct outs work flawlessly for recording. Mixing is fine if I don't use the buss outs - so I think it's just time for repair. A digital Mackie board is in the future - but for now this is a good board.
thanks,
chris

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Chris Kennison
Ft. Collins, Colorado
"There is no spoon"
www.seldomfed.com

Mark van Allen · Post by **Mark van Allen** » 2 Dec 2002 7:01 pm

I was saving up myself for a D8B and my sweet local gear guru let me borrow four different digital mixers- I was sure I was going for the Tascam DM-24 until I used it, wow, problems galore, some unusable functions and an unfriendly interface- but the major surprise was the new Behringer DDX3216. Super smart intuitive interface, great sounding converters, really decent onboard effects, great automation with plenty of snapshot room, works perfectly with no glitches with my Tascam DTRS machines. I could go on and on, but for $1299! What a bargain. I love this mixer- take a serious look at those and you might want one to use while you save up for the Mackie. I've done fifteen commercial CD releases on it in three months and it's a workhorse!

Alan Kirk · Post by **Alan Kirk** » 3 Dec 2002 6:25 am

As a former owner of a Mackie 24*8, my advice is to dump it.

Not sure what vintage Mackie you have, but the one I had used a method of lowering noise by ADDING out-of-phase noise somewhere in its output circuits. This resulted in a brittle sounding end product.

Ask a professional sound reinforcement person what they think about Mackie mixers, then you'll feel okay about dumping yours and buying something else, something that sounds good, something musical.

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Bill Crook · Post by **Bill Crook** » 3 Dec 2002 9:53 am

Anybody wanting to "DUMP" a Mackie 24*8 or any other Mixer-board,I catch pretty good....

Cain't pay very much or better yet, If it's broken and you just want to get rid of it, contact me.

Bill Crook
crookwf@comcast.net

seldomfed · Post by **seldomfed** » 3 Dec 2002 3:03 pm

Thanks for the comments - I haven't tried lots of other boards lately, but for my money at the time (6+ years ago) the Mackie 24-8 was a great deal. It's quite musical and has yielded some respectable CD's from my studio. I know there's better stuff out there - but there are bigger budgets too. I've been able to pull work away from another local studio who runs a full blown Protools rig because we take time to listen and do the best we can with our equip. Sometimes equipment isn't a limiter - unless it's busted

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Chris Kennison
Ft. Collins, Colorado
"There is no spoon"
www.seldomfed.com