Mackie Big Knob Review

The following is my Mackie Big Knob review.

If you are into computer music making, mixing or anything similar, you know how crucial it is to listen to your tracks through different sets of monitors or speakers. Most of us, unfortunately, find all the switching needed to do that rather painful. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way any longer thanks to the Mackie Big Knob Studio Control Center.

To put it short, what the Mackie Big Knob does, is let you efforltessly switch between up to three sets of studio monitors, or some other speaker configuration, at a push of a button. This is really great if you are a serious DAW user. You won’t need to perform any painful switching anymore or even worse, burn your not yet finished tracks to a CD in order to be able to listen to them on your home stereo. The Mackie Big Knob allows you to compare your music on multiple speaker configurations saving you a ton of time and a lot of unnecessary hassle. You are also able to control the level of each output, of course. In fact, that’s exactly what the intriguing Big Knob on the front panel is for.

The Mackie Big Knob can also work great if you have a studio with a seperate tracking room thanks to its Talkback features. It allows you to easily communicate with other musicians through its built-in Talkback mic and features the handy activation switches, as well as two high-powered headphone outputs coupled with a headphone mix bus, which really solves most of the common studio communication problems.

The Mackie Big Knob also comes with a built in ability to handle up to four different input sources simultanously which can be quite useful during recording, although it’s quite likely that you have a mixer already if you record a lot. Anyway, this is a pretty nice feature.

All of Mackie’s products are built like a tank, and the Big Knob seems to be no exception. It looks like built to last, and will certainly serve you well over a considerable period of time.

To sum up, I can only say that the Mackie Big Knob is a piece of studio gear you wouldn’t want to live without. It works great for comparing mixes and if you are a serious DAW user, the Big Knob is a unit you really need to consider.