Looking at buying a mixer for my band: thinking either Yamaha MG16/4, Behringer SL2442, or Mackie 1604VLX-Pro.

3 vocal mics
1 bass
2 guitars
(5-6) and how ever many inputs the drummer needs

I've heard Mackie is the better buy in the long run. Just curious if you guys had an opinion. I know everyone has one.

Just jamming in Texas

I use a Behringer with my band and it works fine. For the money they are inexpensive and pretty durable. It really depends on what's most important to u...money or name brand?

Behringers have a wide bad reputation on the internet audio forums. However, personally I've never had a problem with a Behringer, but with other cheaper brands yes. Behringers are made with as few components as possible, thus resulting in a lower-price product.

Most would go for the Mackie for the reliability. However, it really makes no difference how "quiet" or "transparent" the mic preamps are if you're just mixing a band live or doing recordings at reasonable volume. Yamahas are somewhat new on the market, but I'm sure they are fine (if certainly over-priced in my opinion)

Phonic Helix24FW 24-Channel Mixer with FireWire

96 kHz FireWire interface for streaming 18 independent channels of audio to computer with near-zero latency.


a god send.
[Edited 1/11/07 4:59am]

talking about brands, Phonic is an off brand wouldn't u say?

talmuzic said:

huh?

Phonic, Behringer and Alto are the budget brands. Seriously, the quality of the mixer is always a relative factor, and at least electronic musicians tend to buy quite cheap ones so they can lug the things on gigs and not be too concerned whether the thing breaks up in the process or not (for the price of one quality mixer you'll get two cheap ones). And I'd much rather have any eight channel cheapo product than a badly designed digital mixer that cost as much as a car (and they're all badly designed anyway).