MACKIE REPRESENTATIVE: We have another pair of products that we have in the rack above. This is the Onyx 400F. It’s a FireWire interface, 10 inputs, 10 out, and it actually has a 64-bit floating-point mix engine inside. And what this allows you to do is save presets of any routing you want. You can literally make channel one go to all 10 outputs or three of the outputs and all at different levels, and you can mute and solo things, so there’s actually a built-in 64-bit floating-point mixer within this product. It has built-in direct box here just by pushing the front, metering, and a bunch of other features that it’s actually pretty deep I can’t get into right now in the course of this, but it’s on our web site at Mackie.Com.

And this is one of my favorite products. It’s the 800R. It’s an eight-channel interface and it actually spits out three formats at all times. So, you can use it as a three-way splitter if you need it to. So, it has the analog running, the AES/EBU running, and the ADAT running all at the same time, and the AES/EBU is actually switchable to SPDIF format if you need it.

There are a lot of features in this as well such as MS ability, so you have your mid and your side here and you can control the stereo width simply by turning this one up, and these two first channels also have variable impedance, 300, 500, 1,300, and 2,400 ohms selectable to whatever sounds best with your mic or whatever you happen to like.

Another unique features is it has dithering built in. If you had to record down to 16-bit format, most other preamps that have built-in conversion will just truncate or chop off those last eight bits. In this case, we actually have built-in dither so you just push the button and it’s a true dithering down to 16 bits. And my favorite just because it makes a lot of sense and it’s easy is instead of putting everything on the first two channels and giving some kind of super-powerhouse two channels, as soon as you plug a bass into channel 1 or 2, you’ve now lost one channel that actually has impedance switching on it or you’ve lost the ability to do your MS encoding or decoding on those channels, so we just moved them over here. It’s a very simple design choice to do. Plug in your bass, push the button, and you’re ready to go when you can still record here in stereo if you wish. So, 800R is also a wonderful interface for Pro Tools HD systems. You can expand and get eight more analog inputs to your HD system by simply entering a 17-sample offset within Pro Tools, and it will mellow down. It works perfectly well. So if you just want to add high-quality mic pres or line inputs because it will accept line as well, you can simply connect this digitally right into a Pro Tools system.