ONYX BLACKJACK DRIVERS
ONYX BLACKJACK PORTABLE

The thorn in my side: The ONLY reason this wasn't an absolute home run for Mackie was the massive and total screwup with the ASIO drivers for Windows. XLR outputs would have been nice as well, although the size of the chassis would not have allowed both the 1/4' inch outs it sports now AND XLRs however the 1/4' can accept a balanced or unbalanced plug, so one only needs a simple adapter to go from 1/4' balanced to XLR. The not so good: A few nitpicky things I would have liked to have seen would be a 4 or 6 segment LED for input metering rather than just the single light on each channel (lights green when signal is present, and turns red when overdriven).useful enough, but a larger meter would have been nice. (I have no personal experience there, as I use SONAR, but most reviews I have seen of Tracktion paints it as an easy to use and straight ahead platform.) Also should be noted that it comes packaged with Mackie's Tracktion 3 recording software, which has received positive reviews.

ONYX BLACKJACK PORTABLE

Perfect for use in a portable rig, and the Onyx pres continue to be the hands-down best in class for their price range. Also has an input monitor for zero-latency monitoring of your sources while recording (I found this to be a little on the quiet side, so you have to crank it right over to get a usable volume, but otherwise worked great). USB bus powered, so no need for an external power source, intelligently laid out, with phantom power and Hi-Z available on both channels. The good: Mackie built a great little 2x2 box that's compact, built like a Brinks truck, and featuring their killer-for-the-dollars Onyx preamps. A great option, covering lots of bases.This is sort of a 2-sided review.because in many ways this is a great product, but in one very large way it isn't. With its brick outhouse construction and USB bus power, it's an ideal portable companion to a laptop but equally at home in a fixed location where it will handle all manner of audio sound sources with aplomb. There are plenty of two-by-two audio interfaces on the market, many of them a lot less expensive, but the Blackjack exudes quality. If you are looking for 96kHz recording you'll need to look elsewhere but if 44.1kHz and 48kHz are your preference, this Mackie has little to fault it. There's bags of headroom available and we obtained clean and detailed recordings with both mic and guitar signals. Onyx mic preamps coupled with Cirrus Logic converters ought to be a recipe for quality sound and the Blackjack doesn't disappoint. You can also switch between stereo and mono monitoring of the input signal so, if you are only using one input channel, you can hear it right up the middle rather than in one ear only. With separate volume controls for the monitor and phone outputs, it's very easy to set up the monitoring exactly as you need it and there's no need to be concerned about any latency delay as there's an input monitor knob that facilitates zero-latency monitoring by routing the analogue signal directly from the preamps to the monitoring outputs. The gain knob on each channel is linked to an LED that lights green to show a healthy signal and blinks red to show any overload. All signals are catered for, phantom power for condenser mics being globally applied from a front panel switch while the jack component of the combi sockets will handle line level and Hi-Z instrument signals so you can plug guitars and basses straight in - each channel having its own switch for selecting between line and Hi-Z mode.

Onyx blackjack