Mackie Onyx Artist 1-2

Modern hardware

The American brand Mackie, known to many as a manufacturer of studio / concert acoustics and mixing consoles, has recently entered the sound card market. And they immediately went with trump cards. Although entry-level, the Mackie Onyx Artist 1-2 audio interface boasts state-of-the-art XMOS xCore 200 + CS4272 converters) supporting 192kHz sampling rate and an impressive 100dB signal-to-noise ratio. Purely in terms of characteristics, this is already more interesting than half of the entry-level sound cards designed for home studios. The Onyx Artist 1-2 also looks great.

High-end proprietary Onyx preamp

It gets more interesting when it comes to testing preamps. There is only one audio input (Jack / XLR), but what! Onyx's proprietary preamp in terms of overall sound quality and detail is on par with most sound cards in its price range and is at least on par with Focusrite and Presonus. Some musicians say they are even better. It sounds very clear, pleasantly surprises with a high level of detail, has an impressive volume with almost no noise, and when recording, it introduces a minimum of dynamic distortion in the frequency range.

carouse driver

But this is partially offset by problematic drivers that are capricious depending on the operating system. In the test sample, the input volume level began to decrease over time. Although the knob remained in the same position, and the volume did not change in the Windows settings. And a couple of times she just “fell off”. I had to plug in and out the cable. And judging by the reviews on the network, this is not an isolated case - for someone everything works without problems, for someone there are similar dumps or strong recording delays, which are solved by installing the AsIO4ALL drivers. It would seem that this problem is not so difficult to solve, but complaints periodically appear to this day.