In article .com,
wrote:
I've heard from a handful of people that Mackie is worthless. My church
uses a midrange Mackie (it's a vlz-80, i think) board speakers, and i
think they work fine. So somebody, everybody, tell me, are they good or
bad?

Mackie has been around for a long time. They have made a lot of different
kinds of gear.

For a long time, Mackie was pretty much the best console available in the MI
market. That's not saying much, but their small consoles were respectable
and worked well enough.

Two thing have happened, though: first of all Mackie got into the larger
console market and has tried to compete with the big guys, and secondly they
have branched out into other products besides consoles.

This means that, if you want an 8-channel stage mixer, Mackie was about the
best you could get, but if you wanted a 48-channel 8-buss mixer, it was about
the worst you could get.

The truth is that now Mackie is moving production to China, the quality
seems to have suffered a lot. And the competition is getting better: for
example, A&H now has a workable little stage mixer with EQ that actually
sounds good.

Mackie also had a little reliability issue a couple years ago, which was
tracked down to a board pin connector problem. That did not help their
reputation any.

There is a huge gap between the MI-grade gear and the low-end pro-grade gear,
and Mackie is trying to straddle it. This seems like a bad idea to me, but
I'm not a marketing guy.

That said, I'd rather lick a toilet seat than have to use a Mackie SR 24-4
again. But their little studio monitors aren't half bad, and the 1202 is still
probably the best front end around in its price range.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."