Some comments on the Mini G3 & Onyx1640(i)

[browniespeaks]

I'm at work killing time while i wait for 6 hours of 16 track audio to import into PTLE 8.0.4cst. So i thought I'd take a minute to talk about the Mbox Mini G3

First and foremost the word that this thing sounds great is an understatement. Last week I needed to trans-code a session from 6.9 to 8.0 to take it into a mix room. Well To do so i patched the mini into our console and bypassed the Rosetta. I expected it to sound like poopy. To my surprise with the exception of the phase being reversed on one of the channels and cancelling out if summed to mono, easily fixed by swapping phase on a channel, the mini sounded way better than a Rosetta 200 that normally does D/A for the control room. It was cleaner crisper and more refined. This is by far one of the best sounding laptop ready portable interfaces i have ever had the pleasure to use.

The negative on it... drivers could still use some work. I frequently get the "cant find digidesign hardware" issue and it can only be resolved by reinstalling the drivers. Windos Kernal Streaming still works in other apps so its not the box its the driver interaction with PTLE. Also when CPU load gets high the box gives that digitized output until the buffer setting is changed then everything is ok. annoying and embarising in front of clients but a 2 second fix.

The input side sounds very nice. No noticeable self noise unlike Mbox2 series and no DC's offset. I think this is rather funny since Digidesign/Avid claimed that my PC's power supply was the cause of this. Makes me think it was a design flaw in the DC filtering in the usb chain on the MBox2. No wine in the output unlike this mbox2 series.

Before i received this one i don't think i would have trusted Avid enough to purchase a stand alone interface from them. I mean they were just not the experts in this specialty. I have changed my mind. This is a first tear 2 channel interface. I cant believe its bus powered!

on to the people mad at Avid for selling you PT9 for what they believe to be a fair price. Be glad you did not purchase or upgrade the makie I series mixers so that you could use them with PT. Those pore folks paid for the mixer (whatever the cost) then paid another $50 for a driver upgrade from mackie, then had to buy a full version of PTM-powered. Then if they want PT9 they dont qualify for the recently purchased 7-8 upgrade they qualify for a cross grade that cost more than the le xgrade. All the while they could have purchased the less expensive non (i) version of the mixer with the firewire option and ASIO drivers then just purchased pt9. Talk about getting shafted. Just goes to show no matter how bad you think avid is others are worse. Now mackie is touting its new (i) series as the first to be fully compatible with PT9 LMAO

[sunburst79]

I'm glad to hear that the new MBox sounds that great. I'm hoping that they will offer something beyound the 003 designed for PT9 that takes advantage of PT9s new features and sounds great.

Nice to hear that the MBox sounds better than the Rosetta.