Mackie have long been an industry standard between DAWs for mixing surfaces and many new knock offs use the Mackie protocol for talking with the DAW. The previous Mackie Control went unchanged for years and there was rarely a complaint about this as it was a great design and a winning control surface for many DAW applications. 

The latest release will have a keen eye notice that there is little that has changed apart from a new and updated style. The actual control options and layout are exactly the same. So how does it perform? Well I have updated my original review from 2 years ago to include information relevant to my last 2 years of experience with this product.

The Numark HDX is a "digital turntable" that uses a CD player or an inbuilt 80GB HDD to play the music but has a full sized 12" vinyl platter to control the playback. It offers the complete feel of vinyl but allows the convenience of direct CD/MP3/WAV to be used 

The Numark CDX is a "digital turntable" that uses a CD player to play the music but has a full sized 12" vinyl platter to control the playback. It offers the complete feel of vinyl but allows the convenience of direct CD or MP3 CD files to be played. 

The Presonus Firebox is a 6 in 8 out Firewire Audio Interface for MAC and PC capable of 96Khz sample rates. While it may be an older player in the audio interface market it has been a very reliable and great quality audio interface providing everything I have demanded of it.

The ZOOM H4n is a portable audio recorder aimed at the armature professional market and is a great starting point when looking at portable audio recorders. Compared to the high end options like Tascam and Sound Devices it may look like just a kids toy and while it may not have some of the nice features of the bigger players, it does offer great quality recording at 1/20th of the cost. 

 The MPD32 is a MIDI controller based on the very popular MPC drum machine created by Akai. The 4x4 drum pads look and feel very similar but there is no audio capabilities with this device. It is purely a MIDI controller.

In addition to the 16 rubber drum pads the MPD has 8 faders, 8 buttons, 8 endless rotary encoders, transport controls, controller bank switches, 32 preset locations, foot control inputs and a MIDI clock.

The MPD32 can operate as a Control Surface in Ableton (and possibly other applications) allowing the top faders to auto-map to the first 8 tracks and the below buttons can control the ARM function of these 8 tracks. Additionally, the 8 encoders will auto-map to the first 8 MIDI assigned controls in a rack or macro controls without learning. The pads themselves will automatically map to the pads shown in Abletons drum rack and will follow you through as you click through the rack.

The AKGK240 are a cost effective but high quality pair of semi-open monitor headphones. These were my first major purchase when I started out over 15 years ago replacing a cheap set of headphones I had been using for monitoring mixes. Being so young (just 19) at the time I was not really aware of how much of a difference a good pair of cans could make until I put these around my ears.