This months Sound on Sound has a review of the MultiMix16. In summary:

"Given its low price, the Multimix Firewire 16 offers extraordinary value for money"

"The Multimix may be built to a price, with competent rather than esoteric audio performance, but the strategy has clearly paid off. After all, where else can you buy a multi-channel mixer, an 18-input audio interface, and a digital effects processor for such a small outlay?"

They didnt like the uneditable effects parameters, but I wonder who would actually use the effects given the quality of the plugins that come right out of the Sonar box? Another brickbat for the fixed mid band EQ and inability to bypass the EQ but all up it was a good review.

The review was done on a Mac and they did have a few driver issues early on.

Anyway, the rest of the article is available online if you subscribe to SOS which I really think is one of the best Magazines out there and well worth the money.

Thanks for the info Jim, a qusetion for you.

Are you using a PCMCIA card for a 6 pin connection on your laptop, or are you using
the 4 pin that is on the laptop itself? (I have been using the 4 pin on a laptop in ASIO mode.)
I thought that a 6 pin supplied power for something and a 4 pin, like on a laptop did not.

Thanks for the tip on how and where to change the DMA buffer size.

randy

4 pin firewire port - yes it works for me
I'm using the Alesis MultiMix 16 with the jan 06 firmware/drivers update through the mini 4 pin firewire port on my Dell inspiron 6000 (2ghz 1 gig ram, dedicated 128mByte video, 72000RPM 60 Gig drive machine, using an external USB2 7200RPM seagate HD in a acomdata case). This is with the January drivers

It works great, I've recorded 3 8 track sessions now, stopping about every 5 or 10 minutes and saving. However, One time I booted up and then turned on the MultiMix and then Sonar and it wasn't visible to the system. I had to turn off the laptop and the multimix, reboot the laptop, and then turn on the MulitMix again and it worked perfectly. This only happened once but I am going to keep my eyes out for this as it worried me.

So far I think the product is great and it works well with Sonar.

Skylab which are you using ASIO or WDM for the driver?

randy

I'm using ASIO. I had used the MOTU896 prior to installing Multimix and it was set to ASIO, (the MOTU didn't seem to perform well in WDM). So when I installed Multimix it came up in asio automatically and works fine in that setting. I haven't tried the Multimix in WDM yet. I haven't tweaked buffers or anything either, and the minimum latency sonar allows is 5.8ms for my system so far, which these days isn't that fast. It may be able to go lower with adjustments in the buffer size but I haven't explored that yet.

Hi Skylab,

I read with interest that you moved from a MOTU to a MultiMix...

Have you tried running both at the same time? I understand that most audio applications can only talk to one ASIO driver at a time, so you can't run use multiple audio interfaces simultaneously unless you use the WDM drivers.

However, I have read that there is a 'virtual driver' called ASIO4ALL which acts as a single ASIO driver as far as the host application is concerned, but it can talk to several audio interfaces via their WDM drivers. Apparently quite a lot of people are successfully running multiple audio interfaces in this way, but it can be a little hit-or-miss. It simply doesn't work for everybody.

I am very interested to see whether anybody has tried running a MOTU audio interface and a MultiMix simultaneously (either using ASIO4ALL, or some other way). The reason I ask is that I have a MOTU 828mk2, but I'd really like to expand my number of inputs without having to ditch my existing audio interface (or fork out for another 828). I really like the look of the MultiMix's combined mixer/Firewire setup ... a MultiMix 16 Firewire would do the trick very nicely ... it's just a matter of whether it's possible to run the two different audio interfaces at the same time...?

Hi,

Sorry, I returned the MOTU before I tried using both together. Without any facts to base this on, I don't have much confidence that you could get away with combining these.

By the way, last night again Sonar lost communication with the Multimix. This always during a pause in the recording thankfully, Sonar would no longer recognize that there was the multimix present. This happened 2 or 3 times during a 3 hour session. It turns out that a reboot of the laptop wasn't necessary. My solution was to shut down the Mixer, shut down Sonar. Turned the mixer back on, and open Sonar again and once again the connection would be good. So now I have less confidence in this system than before, but I haven't had time to look for hidden causes so I can't fault Alesis (yet). MOTU was in fact more stable. Still, the multimix recordings are fine and it works pretty well.

skylab:

Any chance of getting samples posted that you recorded with the Multimix? My band is on the verge of purchasing one of these, and we're just looking for a nicely mixed sample to push us over the edge.

If not, that's fine :) We'll probably wind up buying it anyway.

Hi dfin13 -

The band isn't ready to post it for the world yet, but I'd be happy to email you a 2 megabyte mp3 snippet of a short improv. Email me if you still want it - you can see my email address in my user name.

By the way, Last rehersal I couldn't connect to the multimix until the 4 th try! However, after that, it worked flawlessly for hours. I don't understand the tempermentalness of my setup, yet it is. Still, I'm happy about the unit despite this flaw that would be very troubling to some. I worry mostly about live shows which I would like to record where I won't be able to fuss with rebooting the mulitmix 3 or 4 times.

Other negatives: The computer records the signals after the EQ section and after the fader. I wish I could record before the EQ and fader. For example, I may want to turn down the treble on the vocal to avoid feedback, but it would be great to have a flat EQ on the recording. I may also want to mix just a little guitar and bass into the headphone mix (see below) particularly using closed headphones, but I can't. The multimix records a muted track just fine, but if you turn down the fader, you get a turned down recording.

Other tricks of the trade:
1)
The bass amp we use has a direct out. The cheap mics I'm using don't do justice to the low frequency stuff, and of course since everyone is in the same little room each mic picks up a lot of all the other instruments. The direct out gives isolation between channels. In the end it sounded better than the mic on the amp.
2)
Using a Nady 4 channel Headphone amp: Headphones for all and no PA. Vocals only go into the headphones so far. This way, you can record the song, remove and redo the vocals later if needed (which is impossible with a PA since other mics pic up amplified vocals and then you can't get the vocals out of the other tracks), and even if you want to keep the original vocal track, you have no feedback problems, and no sound of the PA bouncing off the walls. However - closed headphones really reduce the overall volume of the room. Which may be a good thing, but it also takes something away from the experience of playing. I plan to try the open type of headphone next to maintain the room sound as well.

3) It ain't perfect. There is a lot of bleed through between tracks. I use SONAR effects like EQ and compression to make a mix out of it. Still, it's way better than trying to record the room. Now for an acoustic group this may not be necessary, but for a loud band playing in a situation where the vocals get drowned out by loud instruments, this method can help get a decent mix recorded.

If by chance I'm mistaken about any of the above, please chime in.

Hey thanks for the experience report, very useful.

Cheers!