The Onyx 1640i Firewire Production Mixer provides a tremendous collection of professional analog features and extremely deep DAW integration, but it is so much more than that. The streamlined, modern design might even tempt you put together a museum quality display for your engineer friends to admire. Plus, since it’s a Mackie, you can be sure that it is “Built-Like-A-Tank” and will survive years of abuse.
Any audio company can stack a bunch of inferior components into a chassis and, believe us, a lot of them do. This is never the case with a Mackie mixer. Everything about the Onyx-i Series smacks of quality, because only the most quality, high-end components are used throughout the entire signal path. At the front end, you have the pristine signal boost offered by the Onyx mic preamps, which will likely get routed through the legendary Perkins EQ. The signal then passes through a series of sealed rotary knobs, which keep dust and grime out of the potentiometer.
Then your mix hits the summing bus, which has been custom-designed to offer the highest possible headroom while protecting the sonic quality offered by the aforementioned components. Maybe you assigned the signal to stream across the FireWire outputs.
If so, your signal will glide effortlessly out of (and back through if your returning streams) the ridiculously high-end Cirrus converters. These converters are the best Mackie has ever specified, and can be found in some of the most esoteric (and expensive) interfaces out there today. From start to finish, Mackie-designed gear is more often than not, the result of customer interaction and suggestion. The end result is that, no matter how you use it, the Onyx 1640i by Mackie offers the quality demanded by industry professionals.
