The Mackie Onyx 1620 comes across as robust and well thought-out, and comes with plenty of features packed in to that compact frame.

Channels one to eight have individual phantom-power switches, plus indicator LEDs, along the top panel.

They're also equipped with four-band EQ, offering sweepable hi-mid and low-mid.

It's likely you'll want to spend much of your time with these first eight channels, because their EQs are a joy.

They overlap well and you can get away with cranking them up a fair way. Normally you'd aim to cut, but the Mackie's channel EQ has a lot of headroom.

There's a kill-switch for each and punching them in and out for comparison reveals great tone with no discernible colouration.

In a similar manner to Behringer, Mackie has pursued that British-console sound and the effort put in to the EQ's design certainly shows.

The digital interface is an optional extra, although it's included in the price, and slots into a bay to provide two FW400 ports and 16 audio channels at 96kHz, 24-bit.

The Onyx 1620 offers more than we've room to write about here. It's well-built, packed with features and sounds excellent.

As a stand-alone analogue mixer for studio or live use it gives you an immense amount of control.