Guitar Player Too Loud? Send Him An Email!

A recent audio trade journal I read featured the new Mackie DL1608 digital mixer.  Something about the picture at the top of the page really looked familiar.  Reading the article, I quickly realized why.

The “mixer” turned out to actually be a docking station for an IPad.  By placing the tablet computer in the mixer frame and downloading an app, the IPad became a 16 channel mixer with lots of features found on much more expensive mixers.

This is an interesting idea and it has a lot of potential, but it also leads to some interesting questions.

This is not an inexpensive item (almost $1000 list) and that does not include the IPad.  Without the tablet computer, it is a very expensive door stop.  If you supply your own Ipad, it means that the church/school/club/whatever that needs a mixer will not have a working model unless somebody’s IPad is in the house.  The flip side of this is that in order to make sure that the mixer is available whenever it is needed, it might require having a dedicated tablet computer for just one purpose.  That means that you might have as much as $1600 tied up in the mixer-pretty pricey for 16 inputs.

Apple has recently thrown IPhone users a serious curve by upgrading/changing the docking connector on the most recent Iphone.  Buying a dedicated mixer that requires an IPad means that when/if Apple upgrades the IPad connector, you would not be able to use the newer version of the tablet with the Mackie’s mixer dock.  That is not the kind of obsolescence that is easy to plan for.

The upsides are obvious.  Constant upgrades of the software and availability of other apps that you might use while recording or mixing live sound are just a couple.  Being able to run an app like a frequency spectrum analyzer for feedback control or a guitar tuner directly from the mixer platform would be great.

The concept of using the IPad or other tablet computer as the engine for specalized audio applications has great potential.  If this concept can be made to work in the real world, Mackie is the company to do it.

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