Mackie Onyx Satellite - Price Drop

[renato777]

Howdy y'all,

Can anybody explain me why did the price of the Mackie Onyx Satellite Audio Interface dropped SO much? I'm talking about a drop from 500$ to about 150$ now.

I mean, I'm really interested on this device but I just find the price too low to be true.

[bexarametric]

It never caught on. Mackie is discontinuing it.

[tINY]

I'll go with Bex's assessment.

It was a pretty decent design, but a little late to market (as 2-4 channel interfaces have gotten smaller in the last couple years). I don't think people mind re-patching that much. That was the big idea of the design.



-tINY

[DrDeltaM]

It's a pretty nice box which sounds pretty good.
There's one big minor tho: when you're recording say a vocal with it, the direct monitoring of that vocal mic will be panned hard left (or hard right if you use input 2). There's no 'mono' button to place the direct monitoring of the inputs in center...

I've used the 'satellite' unit as a dual headphone amp as well, was a handy problem solver one time

Nice about the base unit, is that you can have a surround output with surround volume control, pretty cool for an on-the-cheap surround setup!

[Mylithra]

Can you use this thing as front end pres for another DA converter?

[DrDeltaM]

Originally Posted by Mylithra

Can you use this thing as front end pres for another DA converter?

You could as the satellite has a 'direct monitoring' controle room stereo line out. I'm not 100% sure if this bypasses the build-in convertor tho, you'd have to check with Mackie to be really sure.

[DrDeltaM]

I just checked the manual, the signal on the outputs would indeed have passed the Mackie's AD and DA convertors...

There are inserts on the micpre's tho (using the base-station), so you could use those as (unbalanced) outputs pre-convertor.

[renato777]

Originally Posted by DrDeltaM

It's a pretty nice box which sounds pretty good.
There's one big minor tho: when you're recording say a vocal with it, the direct monitoring of that vocal mic will be panned hard left (or hard right if you use input 2). There's no 'mono' button to place the direct monitoring of the inputs in center...

I've used the 'satellite' unit as a dual headphone amp as well, was a handy problem solver one time

Nice about the base unit, is that you can have a surround output with surround volume control, pretty cool for an on-the-cheap surround setup!

But that only happens with direct monitoring, right? If I monitor on my DAW, I'll hear the vocal mic on both outputs, am I right?

[DrDeltaM]

Originally Posted by renato777

But that only happens with direct monitoring, right? If I monitor on my DAW, I'll hear the vocal mic on both outputs, am I right?

Of course, if you monitor thru your DAW, you can pan it everywhere you want.

[renato777]

Thanks. Just checkin'

[Al Rogers]

I owned one. Sold it on eBay and bought an Apogee Duet. No regrets!

[renato777]

Originally Posted by Al Rogers

I owned one. Sold it on eBay and bought an Apogee Duet. No regrets!

Could you give some more details on that? What was exactly the problem with the unit?

[bengl3rt]

Originally Posted by renato777

Could you give some more details on that? What was exactly the problem with the unit?

My experience with it was very negative. Mackie replaced it three times and every single unit started artifacting after 15-20 minutes of operation.

Sold it and got a Fast Track Ultra. No regrets!

[Mylithra]

Originally Posted by DrDeltaM

I just checked the manual, the signal on the outputs would indeed have passed the Mackie's AD and DA convertors...

There are inserts on the micpre's tho (using the base-station), so you could use those as (unbalanced) outputs pre-convertor.

Yeah.. I checked the manual as well and looked through the block diagram. Would be nice to convert those Ctrl Rm. outs on the pod to balanced mic pre outs, but that might be more of a discussion for the geekslutz.

For under under $200, I doubt you'd find something as nice as these Onyx pres.

[m_gant]

Had one and returned it.
Pros: Price, awesome pres. Built well.
Cons: Hard pan when hardware monitoring. Hum when powering base station by supplied wallwart. Every input goes through AD/DA unless you bypass via insert.

It became clear to me after owning for 3 days that this unit was never fully developed and sadly abandoned by Mackie. I really wanted to keep it, and if the stupid hardware monitor wasn't screwed with that crazy pan thing, I could of lived with the other problems.

[Al Rogers]

The sound was OK but not great. Laying down vocals and hearing yourself hard panned to one side is crazy. I couldn't get used to it. What could they have been thinking when they designed that?

With the Apogee Duet it's easy to put yourself in the center. Their Maestro Mixer works great for direct monitoring. The sound quality is substantially better than the Onyx.

-Al

[Enzo Polotso]

Wow that's a great deal. I got mine for $200 because I needed something small and it's been great.
It's true that it lacks direct monitoring where you could mix what's playing back, and if you do use input monitoring it hard pans 1 and 2 to l and r, but if you bring the samples down to 64 and monitor through your DAW, it works perfectly fine. i've had no stability issues and I'm working on a 4 year old computer. if you cant run 64 or even 32 samples in real time, something is up.
it's been rock solid for me.

[Vocalvoodoo]

For the money, I also find it hard to beat. While I don't think it sounds better than the Duet, it sure beats the hell out of the Mbox2 and Digi002. The one negative I have found is an annoying whine when using phantom power. Not all Satellites have this problem, but a good number do. Mackie is pretty good about replacing them though. I had one replaced, but never sent the new one back because I wound up getting the Duet.

[frankie c]

Question....

could yout just adapt the headphone to mono by using a mono (un bal) 1/4 inch adapter plug into the unit??? would that mix the L + r AND JUST SOLVE IT?

[Dilapidus]

I don't recall where I read it.. but it works. I use headphones in the headphone jack. You don't plug all the way in. One click before it is all the way in and you'll get mono.

[afro54]

FYI for all you bargain hunters - the Mackie Satellite has a firmware update that updates smoothly, and completely resolves the mic panning problem, and a couple of other things besides.

The Mackie preamps are better than the duet's, and I have been running one on my Mac for a couple of years, without problem.

I keep looking at the apogee on ebay - I think more for the aesthetic than anything. It looks very 'Mac'. It has software controls, which I wanted, but don't miss at all.

As for running on Windows, well!

[Muser]

if I look on the site I see
Firmware download v1.50 Release Notes (.pdf) v1.5.0100 (.zip)

which is odd because my OSX firmware package says 1.7.8.

maybe it's a combo package which isn't very clearly named.

although looking in my OSX library package receipts, the package says 1.7.8 as well.