[Mike Rivers]

On Mar 23, 1:45 am, Donovan Digital wrote:

I am about ready to buy my first live mixer. I've narrowed it down to
Soundcraft MFX20 and Mackie CFX20.

Right off, I'd weigh strongly toward the Soundcraft, but it depends on
what you really need and how you intend ot use it.

the mackie has a subwoofer output which feeds an amped/powered
subwoofer system
with a 75hz low cut summed-stereo signal. Is there a way to recreate
this behavior on the soundcraft?

Not directly, but you may not need it. If you're using a powered
subwoofer, it may have a crossover built into it (and one at the right
frequency rather than a fixed 75 Hz). And you can always add a
crossover at the mixer output. The subwoofer output on the Mackie CFX
is convenient if you happen to have an old big speaker and power
amplifier laying around and want to add some boom to your mix. But in
a more modern system, it's best to use something else. Same for the
(noisy and undefeatable) graphic equalizer on the Mackie outputs.

Is the only way to solo listen to a channel on the soundcraft to move
my headphone plug?

No need to do that. The headphone output either monitors the PFL
(solo) bus or the selected output bus (Main mix, subgroups, or
external "tape" in). The selected output is what's normally fed to the
headphones, but pressing the PFL switch on any channel overrides that
selection and switches the headphone and monitor outputs as well as
the meters to the soloed channel. Note that these MONITOR outputs are
for speakers in the control room, not to be confused with (or used as)
stage monitors. You'd feed stage monitors from an AUX output.

A distant third is a Yamaha MG206C-USB, because my associate has a
macbook which we could theoretically use for fx processing. I'm
guessing the latency is unacceptable though.

Mixers with a built-in USB output are useful for live recording where
latency doesn't matter. Generally they aren't set up for convenient
work in the studio environment where you're overdubbing and latency
does matter. Like I said, it depends on the application. I've played
with a small MG series Yamaha board and it sounds quite good. Hard to
believe that they can make something that good for the price, but it
feels (and is) quite plastic and might not hold up very long under
hard use. But I don't really know.

In general, what does everyone think about these units?

While I'm a pretty big supporter of Mackie in general, I don't care
for the CFX. It's OK in applications where a one-box solution is
important because nobody really knows how to use a mixer and hook up
components. But it doesn't share many of the design features like the
clean and quiet mic preamps that earned Mackie its reputation for
decent modestly priced mixers.

Is a Mackie VLZ3 within your budget? It doesn't have all the bells and
whistles of the CFX, but those bells and whistles are kind of weak.