MusicRadar Verdict
You get a lot for your money with the Onyx 1620, it looks built to last and has top tonality.
Pros
- +
Great sounds. Rugged construction. Great EQ's.
Cons
- -
Not a lot here.
MusicRadar's got your back Our team of expert musicians and producers spends hours testing products to help you choose the best music-making gear for you. Find out more about how we test.
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.
“I knew since I first listened to the music that it was gonna be big - because the music was incredible”: Charli XCX's Brat mastering engineer Idania Valencia on finalising a modern classic
“He stopped writing, I think, because he just ran out. He had used that guitar neck up. He did everything and anything that neck could do”: Sammy Hagar explains Eddie Van Halen's lost years
“After every take, Mutt would say, ‘Check the tuning, man!’ This went on and on for almost a year. One day, I just gave him the guitar and said, ‘You tune it. I can’t take this anymore!’”: How legendary producer Mutt Lange drove the Cars half-mad
