When it comes to making music, I’m always on the lookout for new gear that will make my life easier. When I saw the Alesis MultiMix16 I thought I’d found something special. It’s a 16 input mixer, with an inbuilt FX processor and the ability to connect to your PC via Firewire and act as a 16-input audio card. Looking at the spec, I thought I would be able to replace four pieces of equipment (my current mixer/external effects/compressor/sound interface) with one.
However, my experience of the Alesis equipment left a lot to be desired. Opening the box, I was very impressed with the general construction of the mixer. It has a metal chassis and good solid knobs, though the channel sliders were a bit plasticky. Operation seemed simple, install the drivers, connect the mixer and then connect your music equipment to the mixer. Unfortunately, my PC didn’t want to recognise the equipment on the first pass. So I visited the Alesis website and downloaded/installed the latest drivers, as you do.
On the second attempt, with the new drivers, my PC recognised the mixer and I thought I was in business. Unforunately, I had major issues when getting it to work with recording software SONAR with a number of the inputs failing to be recognised in the standard ASIO mode. Switching to WDM mode rendered the interface useless with it juddering and stuttering and crapping out at every opportunity.
But this time I was getting a little frustrated and this frustration was compounded by the fact that the signal output from the PC was significantly louder than the input from my equipment. Even though I tried to get a clean, loud signal, my eardrums were nearly burst by the output from the PC. No matter what I did, I could not get a decent balance between the input and output signals.
I tried using the mixer with the supplied Cubase software, but I am not a big fan of that application for audio recording. Anyway, the mixer worked better with Cubase and to me it seemed as if the mixer had been designed with this audio software in mind and that there was no way I was going to get any satisifaction with SONAR, my software of choice.
This was not good. It suddenly got a lot worse when I selected a stereo pan delay on my FX processor. This makes the guitar signal bounce from ear to ear, but in this case I noticed that the signal seemed really flat. At first I thought that my ears were blocked and then it dawned on me that the output from the headphone socket was coming back in mono, yet it was a stereo signal when played back a recording from the PC. What this means is that you could play a lovely stereo piano sample and live it would sound mono, yet when you played back the recording it would be stereo as intended. It was at that moment that I realised I needed to get a refund immediately.
I double-checked with The Missus that my ears weren’t on the blink and she agreed that there was something fundamentally flawed with this mixer. We immediately packaged the item up and got it ready for return. On paper, this seems like an ideal solution for anyone with a small studio in need of major space saving, but it has to be the singularly worst piece of audio equipment I’ve ever used and it’s a crying shame because if the MultiMix16 had worked as intended it would be a first-class piece of kit. My recommendation to anyone thinking of buying this item is not to until Alesis fix all the problems.
RRP: £385
Website: www.alesis.com
dude, youve made me a full person again. i thought all the problems between me and my alesis multimix 16 were my fault…i was a bad person.
how refreshing to find someone experiencing all the same problems. youre right, if this mixer worked the way it says on paper, it would be a fine piece of equipment. ive had it for 5 days now and havent been able to play one previously recorded project in sonar 5 producer, the entire way through, without something going wrong. no matter what combination of drivers, buffers, or other settings, one cant make this thing work…and yes, i too experienced sonar recognizing only 12 inputs when the mixer is 16 (actually 18 if you count the stereo main).
alesis is sending me a new mixer because they seem to think its the hardware…this i doubt highly, and expect ill be fighting to get money back or to trade it in on a MOTU 828mkII.
and on a final note, the support at alesis, should they read this, needs to develop a more systematic, sensitive response and attitude to problems. they didnt even have a step by step process of elimination to go through…they would simply say “well, did you try this? did you do that?”. when calling them 5 times with issues, they start to act like its not their fault and that YOU are the problem. their scatter brain approach does nothing to help.
…this just sucks.
sincerely
a t vish
http://www.soundclick.com/carolblaze
I’ve had the same problems with the Alesis multimix16 working with SONAR, and I’m trying to find out–is there a product has the same capabilities as the alesis board that works well with SONAR?
one word… nuendo
I agree completely with the assesment that Alesis has completely struck out with this. It sounded like a dream come true, well, in my experience it’s a waste of time, money and energy. I’m ready to go with a Korg D3200 or a Tascam 2488 and get away from the frustrations of fighting with this board. Alesis is no longer on my list of “good names”. Don’t waste your money here.
Sorry to here about the problems you all seem to have.I have done some homework on this and it appears that alesis are still updating WDM drivers as we speak and that Sonar users will have to keep trying.As for ASIO and cubase apparently there are no problems.Seems like such a good board for the money.Fingers crossed!
Hi folks
I to thought the Alesis Multimix 16 was an answer to a prayer. I have already had one power supply unit fail. I have a new one and it seems to be working but still gets very warm as does the desk. Is this normal or is there something wrong. In the short time I have had it it seems to do the job with Sonor.
it’s because you’re using sonar, i guess it’s not common, like there aren’t many studios that would use it because there are better programs out thre. but yeah, i’ve had the multimix about 3 month now, and it’s been perfect, i use it with cubase sx 3, it’s not so good with cubase 4 though, i couldn’t get it to pick up all the channels for some reason, but with cubase sx 3 it works like it was built for it ^^
I wish I’d found these reviews 2 years ago when I bought a Multimix 16 Firewire.
Exactly like you say, seems like a dream come true – in reality a visit from a little devil.
1) Almost impossible to install.
2) Level from PC to Inputs is miles out
3) Multimix often stops talking to PC half way through big recordings
4) Multimix dissappears off PC (the device drops off the system)
> I changed everything in the PC first – which cost a lot of money and time (as I was convinced that after only a month of ownership it couldn’t be the Multimix)
5) I have had to send it back to Alesis twice
i) First time because they had to swap out the firewire interface… it was with them for 4 weeks (they couldn’t replicate the fault… imagine my frustration when I found out they hadn’t tried recording through it!!!!)
ii) the AD converter has blown internally, all inputs are distorted and unrecognisable.
What a disaster!
I bought a Alesis MultiMix 8 Firewire, and since i bought it I have been told the problem is my firewire card, or my video card, or my computer, or anything else they could blame it on and not take responsibility. We’ll I replaced all my hardware, and this P.O.S. still wont run more than 20 minutes without lagging the computer. It causes high DPC’s (Deferred Procedure Calls), which I detected with Process Explorer (from sysinternals), then the CPU goes up to 100% and I can do absolutely nothing with the pc. Often times it ends with a Blue Screen of Death Error that says Page Fault in AlesisFireWire.sys, however Alesis still insists its my fault and not their poorly designed drivers. I wish I could get my money back, but it too me too long to figure this out. Hope it will spare someone else the agony, of wasting their time and money, hoping to record some music and being left disappointed!
I too have had my share of fits with this device. I found that the best thing to do is install the FIRST version of drivers before they updated them to include the I|O devices they started selling. Any other ones end up in BSOD at some point during your session. Doesn’t matter if you are using Audition, or reaper, or anything else – same issues. ASIO4All seemed to help considerably, however.
NOT impressed – wish I could have waited for the USB model, or better yet, afford to chain together 2 Presonus Firepods for the 16 channels I need!
I have for half a year an alesis firewire multimix 8 and it is absolutely amazing. Works amazing ,the drivers can give 8ms in a huge full of real time effects and vst instruments and mastered project with many channels. No problem at firewire disappearing or anything with the reverb effects. I am afraid your problems has to do with sonar or with windows. I have xp and nuendo 3. Everything perfect. Havent tried sonar to tell you..
Also try asio 4 all, works AMAZING with alesis multimix devices. You can take it to 2ms in a huge project!
Good luck..
Hmmm, i’m about to pick the 12 channel version of this mixer up. I wanted a little practice mixer for the band that can add reverb to the voices and as a secondary use – have it available to record us to analyse orchestration issues – and new song ideas. It’s been a while since all these posts went up – but I’m wondering if the issues have been resolved on this board? It’s important to me that it plays in stereo, and that it functions reliably, at least on the analogue front. Any updates?
Greg (Ontario)
From my experience, I would never buy another Alesis mixer product on spec. On paper, these MultiMix products look great, but the original issues with Sonar and some of the weird mix-down problems I experienced were offputting, especially at the price. This was a while ago when the product was relatively new on the market (still no excuse in my opinion) and I am sure that there have been some updates to the firmware. In terms as a hardware mixer, there are better units out there for the price. If you are on a budget, check out Behringer’s range of mixers – very reliable and very quiet. If you want a digital mixer that can handle sixteen channels via USB and likes Sonar, go for an EDIROL product. I am currently using an EDIROL M-16DX mixer, which is more than adequate for my needs.
Hope this helps,
Darren
For people having trouble with the Alesis desk: try turning off your wireless. You may have to disable it at driver level. If the desk is sharing an interrupt with your wireless hardware things seem to go south for this desk.
Alesis just released Vista 64 bit drivers for this board 1 month ago finally!!!
http://www.alesis.com
I have a mulimix8 usb and have had all sorts of problems! im pretty new to all this but i thought it was me, i have been playing my guitar through the mixer with the monitor in cubase le4 engaged and after a minute or so i hear a click through the speakers and the latency has changed, then i have to turn the mixer off and on and it back to normal!!! im not very impressed at all with it, i had to send it back once before and they had it for 6 weeks, as the mixer just kept clicking and the led lights kept flashing, they sent it back fixed but with no explanation of what went wrong or what they have fixed, im trying to record guitars now and it so damn frustrating having to keep turning the mixer off and on!!! someone please help, i installed asio4all but have no idea how to work it, im new to all this and thought it would be simple lolol how wrong i was!!!
I, too, wish I had read this before buying the Multimix 16 FireWire… two years ago… Only now did I get around to setting things up – and, as you might have guessed… can’t get either one of my firewire-enabled computers to communicate with the mixer. It would have been a good idea if it worked, but…