MACKIE REPRESENTATIVE: Another unit we have available is the Onyx Satellite. This is a very unique product on the market. It’s a two-in, six-out FireWire interface, and the whole raison d’être, the reason of being for this unit is we’re sick of plugging in cables again and again. If you’re working in your studio and you just want to do something as simple as I want to record mic and a direct guitar and then I want to record stereo overheads or stereo something, you’re always patching things in and out. The concept of this is you plug everything into the back of the unit and then you simply select from these push buttons here if you want it to be mic’ed, if you want a built-in direct box, if you want line-level inputs for the two channels, so you don’t have to patch anything.

It has a built-in controller which also controls surround level, built in talk-back for talking back and either slating to you computer or to the talent that you are recording. And another nice item is, to get away from repatching, let’s say that you’re working on a session and mixing inside of your own studio and then a singer/guitar player calls us up, “I have a great idea for a hook. I want to re-overdub something or change something.” Why don’t you come over and do it? You would have to unpatch everything, label everything, and then when you get back patch in again. So, what we’ve done is you simply turn the power off and you pull out the pod unit. On the back, you have two of our premium Onyx mic pres and two line level outs that you could send to anything if you needed it but you can still monitor directly from the two headphone outputs on the front, each with its own headphone control, still have the direct box ability and phantom power. Both this unit and the base unit are auto-powered off of the 6-pin FireWire. If you have a four-pin bus or a four-pin FireWire on many PCs, you simply add in the supplied power supply so you can do it on either of them or run it directly bus powered off of your Mac or any six-pin FireWire bus, drop it in when you return, turn the power on, and you’re ready to mix so no recabling, no having to patch things around.