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(More customer reviews)I was recently looking into ways of kicking my podcasting setup up a notch, and settled on the Mackie Onyx 1220i FireWire mixer. I'm extremely pleased with this decision.
Obviously you don't need something this fancy if you're just getting started. And indeed I've been producing my show, Otaku no Podcast, for almost 4 years using just a standard USB microphone. But I was beginning to outgrow that setup. Adding a co-host was one factor that pushed me to upgrade. Having each host on their own mic just sounds much better than having everybody crowd around one mic "jazz singer" style. But what really made me upgrade is dealing with group Skype calls. I have been using computer-based Skype call recording software until now, which worked well enough when I only had one other person on the line with me. But things quickly degenerated when I had more than one additional Skype caller. The way Skype call recording software works is that it puts you on one channel, and all other Skype callers on a second channel. Which is fine if you only have one other caller on with you. But if you have two or three (or more) people on a Skype conference call, then they all get mashed into one channel. Which means that, if one person coughs or sneezes while someone else is talking, or somebody's Skype connection goes haywire, or an ambulance/police car screams by in the background of someone's audio, you're in a world of hurt. There's just no way to edit around that.
What I really needed was a way to put each individual Skype caller on their own channel. Which meant that I needed a multi-channel mixer. The Mackie 1220i's four XLR mic inputs means that I can have up to four "live" cohosts, each on his or her own mic. But its two AUX buses means that, using a "mix minus" type setup, I can have two Skype callers each on their own channel. Mix minus means that the Skype callers can hear everybody else, both myself and my "live" cohosts as well as other Skype callers, but they don't hear an echo of themselves (which gets really weird and annoying). And all of these channels get sucked into my Mac where I can individually tweak or fiddle around with them to my heart's content. Finally I have a Zoom H4n solid state recorder plugged into the mixer's "main mix out," which serves as a backup recording in case the computer recording fails for some reason (it's been known to happen). This has turned out to be a very flexible setup, and the Mackie has performed like a champ. It's well built and rock solid.
Unfortunately, the way "mix minus" works is that you need one AUX channel for each Skype caller. So with this setup I can have up to two Skype callers. If I wanted more, I'd need to move up to a bigger board with more AUX buses such as the Mackie Onyx 1620i, which has four of them. Maybe next year.
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