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I am looking to set up my first computer vased recording system after spending years using all in one digital multitracks.

This week I will be purchasing, Logic Pro & a Tascam US2400 controller. Rather than get a standard interface, I was thinking of one of these firewire mixers that have preamps such as the Alesis Multimix or the Phonic Helix.

Has anybody had any success with either of these units, my original thought was to get the Alesis unit, but after googlng tghe product I see that a lot of people have been reporting problems. On the other hand, The Phonic mixer has glowing reports, but I have never heard of them before.

Any opinions?

Comments

rmeulen Fri, 12/29/2006 - 05:08

Depends on your needs.
Both Alesis and Phonic are low budget. Phonic can be compared with Behringer, altho I like phonic better. It's cheap, looks good and performs well. They really have nice stuff. The Helix series are cheap and offer a mixer and firewire stream (multichannel) on one device.

The Alesis has less features but dunno about quality. It looks rigid and knowing Alesis it'll do the job just fine.

On the other hand, the pre-amps and converters of both aren't top-notch. I'd go for other not so expensive board like Focusrite Saffire or Presonis Firepod. Unless you really need a hardware mixer..

anonymous Sat, 12/30/2006 - 17:15

halfcircle wrote:
Has anybody had any success with either of these units, my original thought was to get the Alesis unit, but after googling the product I see that a lot of people have been reporting problems. On the other hand, The Phonic mixer has glowing reports, but I have never heard of them before.

I think Phonic is owned by Yamaha if I remember correctly...Don't know anything else about it.

I own the Alesis Multimix 16 FW and it works great. A number of people reported problems with the drivers. I had problems, but the driver and firmware updates I downloaded in Dec 2005 fixed many of my problems -- except the ability to use WDM drivers in Sonar 4, 5 or 6 however ASIO drivers work flawlessly. I see Alesis has another driver/firmware update available, but I'm waiting to see if anybody reports problems with it since everything works great right now.

You may want to take a serious look at the Mackie Onyx 1620 with firewire card option. Most would say it has better preamps than Alesis, it allows higher sample rates 44-96k vs 44-48k with Alesis, and people don't seem to have a lot of problems with it. But it's a bit more expensive.