Mackie Onyx Producer 2x2 4-stars Reviews

Great value with a few shortcomings

Pros:

+ Good feature-wise for the price

+ Sturdy case without any wobble in the knobs

+ USB Class-compliant

+ Small footprint, useful for a cramped workspace

+ An actually useful manual (the one available on Mackie's homepage that is, not the quickstart in the box).

Cons

- Gain knobs have non-linear behavior, which means up to 80-90% of the of the knob can be just silence and all of the usable range adjustment is compressed into the last few degrees of turning if you have a low sensitivity mic.

- Phantom power and line/instrument buttons don't remain in their "pressed" state between USB disconnects, which is a minor annoyance e.g. if you frequently connect/disconnect a laptop to an otherwise fixed setup.

Solid Piece of Kit

I'd do a proper build quality test, but I still need that hammer.

The Onyx Producer isn't particularly fancy, it lacks some of the features included in other interfaces, but it does what it's supposed to do well. And it sure is sturdy. The headphone amp deserves notable mention, it easily drives 250 Ohm cans despite being USB-powered.

Don't let the cost efficiency turn you off. If all you need is a solid 2x2 USB Interface with good amps, this unit is a great choice.

Great product

I've been using this interface for a month now and I do have some things to say about it.

First of all, it's a pretty good interface for the price. The sound is clear on headphones and the onyx amps are great. I haven't used the main outs for studio montors because I dont have them yet but by the looks of it, the sound is gonna be great aswell on the speakers. The drivers work without a problem and it comes with a nice software package if you wanna record something. It also brings some nice plug-ins.

It has a lot of funcionalities for such a low budget product. the High impedance buttons are pretty usefull for instrument use, aswell as the phantom power button. Buildwise, this little guy has a great feel to it. The texture on the top feels nice and overall it looks really good. The knobs have the perfect amount of resistance and the buttons have have a beautiful clicky feel, also all the lights (signal and hi-z/48V buttons) are bright enough. Overall the interface feels sturdy and well built.

On the other hand, there are two things that bother me a little bit. The knobs have a logarithmic scale, which means that on the first three quarters of the knob, theres not much of the difference (i mean there is but not that strong of an increase in volume/gain) and on the last quarter of the knob, the volume and gain go up a lot more than all the knob until that point. It's a nice concept, I can live with that, but sometimes it isn't that handy.

Now, the last thing that i really hate is that when you turn the mix knob all the way to DAW (so you can hear only your laptop's sound) and you need to turn the headphone volume down, when you get the headphone volume knob close to Minimum, you notice that all the sound starts panning to the right. Also, if you crank the headphone volume up to the max and start turning the Mix knob to Input, when its almost fully monitoring your inputs, you notice the sound coming from the laptop panning to the left. I dont know if theres something wrong with my unit or if it happens to everyone but, since I'm using headphones with an impedance of 250ohms, i probably shouldnt be noticing this all that much.

I don't know if anyone has this problem but I would like to know if someone noticed it aswell.

Besides that, i dont have any complaints. It serves its purpose and for the price it sounds great.