Mackie DFX-12

Mixers for hands-on musicans.Mackie designed the new DFX Series mixers for folks who don’t have the luxury of a front-of-house sound technician. Working professionals who have to control their own mix while making music — and have to do their own set-up and tear-down.
What does that mean? It means that Mackie made the DFX•12 extremely easy to use. For example, if you have a front-of-house sound person to control your effects levels, they can locate a small knob and tweak it.

But if you’re on stage, it’s a lot easier to grab a big, color-coded fader. Plus you can see the fader positions from halfway across the stage.

That’s the philosophy of the DFX Series: make it easy to control a mixer when you’re busy on stage. Channel faders are white. Effects and Monitor Sends are red, master levels faders are blue. The Tape/CD level fader is also white but separated from the channel faders. You get “mixing at a glance.”

Every channel has both a Level Set and Overload LED so you can tell at a glance on a dark stage if one of your inputs is too hot.And of course, both digital effects and a graphic equalizer are built in, so you don’t have to mess with an extra rack of outboard gear.

Above all, superb sound quality.What makes an inexpensive mixer sound cheap? Excessive noise and marginal dynamic headroom. Ask anyone who’s upgraded to a Mackie mixer and they’ll tell you the first noticable difference is that they can load their new Mackie mixer with hot, high-volume inputs without hearing a lot of distortion.That’s due to our special negative gain mix amp architecture. This “higher headroom” is especially apparent with mics plugging into our microphone preamps. Our circuitry can handle screaming vocalists and close-miked drums without “breaking up.”
Low noise is the other difference between the DFX Series and any comparably-priced competition. Our mic preamps are quiet. The mixer’s main circuitry is quiet. The digital effects and equalizer are quiet. In fact, we’ll bet that you won’t be able to tell if your DFX mixer is turned on unless you look at the LED indicators.

Long, logarithmic taper faders.Instead of little stubby faders, the DFX•12 has generous 60mm faders. And their log-taper design means that the sound doesn’t drop to zero abruptly as you lower the volume — you have full level control over the complete length of fader travel.

Accurate 32-bit effects.Unlike a lot of their competitors, Mackie also make digital audio components for recording studios. Mackie's Digital Engineering division applied some of the same technology to the DFX Series’ effects that they use in their $10,000 Digital 8•Bus console.

You get reverb, delay, chorus and thirteen other EMAC™ effects with ultra-realism that not only sounds better than other effects mixers but also rivals outboard processors costing more than either of these mixers.

Even the features have features.Greg Mackie is a rabid keyboard player who loves to jam with other musical Mackoids. So he’s developed some features that could only result from hands-on live sound mixer use.

Effects to Monitor BR. Rarely do you want the same amount of effects in your main PA mix as you do in your stage monitors. The DFX•12 lets you control the level of stage monitor effects with a dedicated rotary control.

Break Switch CL. You finish a set and get ready to leave the stage. But first you have to mute your mic input channels one-by-one so that some idiot doesn’t climb on stage, grab a microphone and start singing “Happy Birthday.” With the DFX Series, you just push the Break Switch. Mic input channels* are automatically muted and the CD/Tape input is live, so you can play music during the break.

Graphic equalizer assign . A graphic EQ is twice as handy when you can either assign it to the main mix (to improve that sound of that aging passive PA system) or to your stage monitors (to cut feedback and/or boost audibility).

The Vocal Eliminator. Backing tracks for cheap. If you perform with pre-recorded music — or if your application includes audience karaoke but not often enough that you carry a whole library of special CDs, the DFX Series can come to your rescue.
The DFX•12 has a Vocal Eliminator circuit that can remove the existing lead singer from most songs. We’re not saying it totally eliminates the vocal on every track on every CD.But it works amazingly well under most circumstances.
Those circumstances have to do with how the Vocal Eliminator works. Using phase inversion, it “nulls” sounds that are panned to the exact center of the mix — which covers about 99% of all vocals. Plus it uses an 18dB per octave filter to “notch out” frequencies between 160Hz and 5Khz — the normal range for most male and female signers. So if the singer on the recording is a 900-pound basso profundo or can hit higher notes than a canary (or an artsy producer who insisted on panning the lead vocal to the extreme left or right) , the Vocal Eliminator won’t knock out the whole vocal. But most of the time, the Vocal Eliminator will give you a karaoke-ready soundtrack from a regular pop, country-western or Christian contemporary CD.

So what’s up with the channel inputs? The DFX•12 actually includes three flavors of channel strips. Channels 1 through 4 accept microphones or mono line level sources, just like Channels 1 and 2 on its little brother. Channels 5/6 and 7/8 accept microphones or stereo line level sources. Channels 9/10 and 11/12 accept stereo line level sources. This combination gives you maximum versatility: you can run up to four microphones and four stereo instruments…or you could run one microphone and use all the rest of the input for instruments and tone modules. Or combinations inbetween.
Those little extras that make a Mackie mixer a better value — now and in the longrun… Low Cut infrasonic filters keep your PA system from getting a woofer hernia. The 75Hz Low Cut filters on the DFX Series’ mono mic channels work wonders at minimizing mic thumps, stage rumble, wind noise and P-pops — subsonic frequencies that rob amplifier power and make woofer cones undulate like belly dancers. Easy level setting. Correctly setting a mixer’s input levels before a gig is critical to optimizing headroom and minimizing background noise. We make it easy by putting a yellow level setting LED on each channel strip. Soundcheck the channel, tweak the Trim control until the light flickers and you’re set! Sweet, musical EQ. The 12kHz High and 80Hz Low shelving EQ on the DFX Series are placed at the far ends of the audible musical spectrum (instead of the traditional 100Hz and 10kHz). They’re based on the design in our CFX and PPM Series, which are acclaimed for their natural sound. And you can actually use them as a midrange control — gently cutting both high and low EQ on a channnel has the audible effect of boosting midrange, and vice versa.

No wall wart! Even our lowest-priced mixers have built-in power supplies. The DFX•12 uses a universal power cord and internal power supply instead of outlet-eating external power supply modules.

Built to last.Finally, the DFX Series maintains our track record of built-like-a-tank durability. Sealed rotary controls keep out dust, liquids and smoke. Thick fiberglass circuit boards and metal main chassis resist impacts that send our competitors’ mixers to the service department. Special wear-resistant wiper surfaces in the faders won’t turn scratchy even after years of use.