During a live recording at a local club last year, I witnessed a wacky scene. We had just finished sound-checking the headlining band. As the band’s techs struck their gear, the house sound crew jumped into action to re-pin the stage for the opening act. Since I was scheduled to just record the headliners, I sat back at the bar to relax.

The opening act was an acoustic duo... two vocals, two guitars and a keyboard. When the house soundman asked the band how many inputs were needed, they enthusiastically responded, “Just two. We do our own mix onstage with our Mackie!” The soundman shrugged his shoulders. You could see his disgust. It was obvious this wasn’t the first time that he had experienced this scenario. The soundman tried to talk the band out of using the Mackie, but they were adamant. “Who knows our music better that us? We do this all the time,” they replied.

The band had a Mackie 1202 rack mounted with two digital reverbs and a BBE exciter. They quickly plugged in their gear and were ready for soundcheck. The direct outs of the acoustic guitars were patched into line inputs. The line output of the Mackie was patched into the house snake. When the soundman brought up their mix in the house, it buzzed like a swarm of angry African bees. Ouch! Then the monitor engineer repatched the Mackie outputs through a couple of transformer direct boxes. The buzz went away, but I could hear the FOH engineer mutter, “This is going to be a long night.”

During the rest of the soundcheck, the FOH engineer and the band tried to get a workable balance between the vocals and guitars. The monitor engineer was completely freaked out because he had no control over individual vocal levels. Every time the vocals were tweaked for the front- of- house, they also changed for the monitors. I could see that the situation had become quite strained.

Then the stage manager came in and yelled, “Doors open in ten minutes!” One of the band members turned to the monitor engineer and said, “Oh, by the way. We’re going to have a fiddle player sit in with us tonight. We’re out of inputs, so we need to run the fiddle line right into your desk.” The soundman groaned again, “Another ‘gotcha’ #*#@** it!!”

When the opening act hit the stage for the show, the audience was still flowing in. By their third song, however, the club was really packed. The show was sold out and I noticed that there were a lot of music industry types lurking in the crowd... record company lizards, radio station “suits” and the usual rock critic swine. They were eager to see the headlining band, a hot new group who were getting tons of good press. What an opportunity for the opening act... a chance to strut their stuff in front of a sweaty, enthusiastic crowd, filled with influential media honchos.

Well, as you may have guessed, the opportunity was wasted. The sound coming from the band’s onstage mixer sounded like festering dog flatulence. The vocals sounded very thin and the guitars had a painful, nasty top end EQ than ripped your head right off. There was too much reverb and it was obvious that the BBE exciter was cranked to 11. The vocal dynamics were all over the place due to the lack of vocal compression. I strolled over to the FOH area, where the house engineer was shaking his head. “Have you ever heard such a load of crap? I’ve tried everything to warm this crap up, but nothing works. Screw ‘em!”

The effect on the audience was also obvious. Many folks, including the industry types, were leaving the main music room to take refuge in the quieter back bar. A few people even went over to the FOH desk to complain, which made the FOH engineer even grumpier.

Towards the end of their set, the duo welcomed the guest fiddle player to the stage. He plugged into the house’s active direct box and the band jumped into a tune. What happened next was weird. Here was the thinnest, nastiest band mix you ever heard with a warm, gorgeous fiddle sound layered over it. The FOH engineer finally squeezed out a smile. “If they had just let me do the whole mix, it could have sounded like that damn fiddle!”

At the end of the set, the band received sparse applause. The crowd seemed to be clapping more for the end of the bad sound than for the band’s performance, which was actually pretty good. The group had a perfect opportunity to make new fans and impress some bigwigs. Instead, they alienated everyone simply because they got caught up a the new craze I call The creeping advance of “Mackie-ism.”

Over the last few years, our industry has been twisted around by the introduction of many affordable new technologies. For mixing consoles, Mackie has been the industry trend setter. Greg Mackie has done a wonderful job in producing American-made, inexpensive consoles that offer more features than previously thought possible. That’s great! Almost single handedly, Greg Mackie has kicked some energy and competition into what had become a very conservative Far East-dominated business. Every manufacturer has responded to Mackie’s innovations, spawning many imitators. The low end console market has never been more affordable or more competitive than it is right now.

But there is a down side to Mackie’s influence on the industry. While Mackie has pushed up the quality of the mixing console market, they have also subconsciously pushed up the perceptions of the engineering skill level that Mackie users have about themselves. Through their clever publications and overly wordy magazine ads, Mackie has created a homespun little universe of “Mackie-ism.” You can’t escape the DIY dogma cultivated in their corporate culture. The old hippie with the Mackie rack mounted to shopping cart is a good example.

If you think that I'm the one who is nuts, try reading a Mackie manual. If you're a professional sound engineer, you'll gag on all the cutesy comments crammed on every page. Gear manuals shouldn't be written in a dry, ‘slide rule’ style, but they don't have to insult the intelligence of experienced users either.

If you read between the lines of the Mackie literature, you will begin to detect a trend: the little references to greedy studio owners, the subtle cracks about live engineers, even references to expensive mobile trucks. (Hey, I’ve got feelings too!!) The attitude seems to be saying, “Why pay big bucks to some studio when you can record your music right at home... You know your music better than some burned-out live engineer.”

Well, the “audio democracy” that Mackie is pushing has some limits. Sure, it’s great to record at home or try your own live stage mix. I’ve heard many Mackie home recordings that are fine productions. But very few have the rockin’ edge that an experienced engineer working in a full blown studio can achieve with racks of tweaky outboard goodies. Sure there’s a big difference in the cost between recording at home and the studio. The real problem with Mackie-ism is not with the quality of the gear itself -- it's that Mackie-ism's devotees have brainwashed themselves into believing that they are, in fact, real engineers. This is not a case of jealousy or ill will on my part. I am not diminishing the skill level or value of any Mackie-based professional studio. I am taking exception to the Mackie company line that implies that just by purchasing a $600 mixer, you can create audio that competes on a professional scale without any previous experience. You wouldn’t attempt heart surgery simply because you buy a first aid kit. It takes years of hard work and experience for an audio engineer to perfect his craft. Mackie and the other manufacturers who copy them are doing our industry an injustice by dissing the professional engineering community with their claims of hobbyist supremacy.

At a recent EARS meeting, someone was describing his thoughts about upscale vintage gear to the assembled EARS throng. He said something like, “Well, you can’t get that kind of sound on a Mackie,” sneering when he said Mackie. The EARS clan laughed in collective agreement. I turned and noticed that a Mackie- based studio owner was shifting uncomfortably in his seat, looking forlorn. What was he thinking? Did we just ruin his own perception of his hard- working studio? Did he think that we were being audio snobs? I felt a little ashamed at our herd- like arrogance. EARS, as a group, needs a little more empathy for all of our members. You don’t need to own a Neve console to be a cool EARS member.

I know that a Mackie 8 bus isn’t the best console in the world, but it sounds better than many real professional consoles costing much more and its performance/cost ratio is one of the highest around. I have some reservations about one or two of its features and functions, but that’s nitpicking. In the hands of a well-seasoned engineer, I think that the Mackie can do some real audio rockin’. But don’t expect that console to produce the same results with an engineer or musician with limited skills.

The creeping advance of “Mackie- ism” isn’t going to stop with mixing consoles or digital multitracks. Inexpensive CD burners, affordable computer-based audio editing, and other “democratic” audio advancements will continue to blur the lines between audio hobbyists and professionals. Fooling around with gear at home is cool, but if you want to get the job done right, it’s time to call a real professional.