Liquid Mix 16 review

wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

I got the Focusrite Liquid mix 16 a few days ago because it is on sale at Sweetwater right now at a very good price. After a few days of using it I have to say I am very impressed.

I installed it and tried it first on the same firewire card I have my pro 40 on. didn't work. Not enough bandwidth. No big problem as I had another firewire card so I just put that in and in the words of John Madden...BOOM! It took off and ran flawlessly. Lesson here is it needs to be on its own firewire buss. A TI chip as well.

Ok so the operation. A few pros and some cons. First the amount of compressors and eqs is almost overwhelming. What are some of these? I had never heard of many. Yep all the big ones, the Fairchild, EL8, 1176, LA2A. 160, and so forth are there, but also many I had never heard of as well. 40 in all. The sound....as good as I can stand. Do they sound exactly like the real ones they emulate. How would I know. I cannot afford to buy 40 compressors to find out. Do they sound good. Yes. very good. Better than the IK multimedia emulations anyway. No hit to the CPU either. It will take me months of using it to even get a little familiar enough with some to know what to do with it I guess.

The GUI...awful. Not much time spent on this during development. For sure it is not one of those that makes a beautiful gui to take your attention away from the sound. It will take some time to get used to it but that is ok because the sound it the most important thing anyway. The hardware is ok, nothing special. The resolution of the knobs is poor. Clicks instead of smooth adjustments. For the best adjustments the gui must be used but for course adjusments the hardware takes your hand off the mouse. The metering on the hardware makes up for that though. Very nice. Best metering I have seen. Led but lots of leds. Not as good as a VU meter but nice anyway.

I won't go into all the features but if you are interested there are many places to find this info. Overall the difference between this and something like the UAD is the hardware controller. A nice idea but not as good as it could have been. You can't get more plug ins either and no reverbs or anything else. Just 40 nice compressors and 20 eqs. All very good. You get either 16 mono instances or 8 stereo instances or a combination of each. Enough for me.

So was it worth the $200? Yep I would say so.
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Mr Mahogany · Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2010 3:05 am Post subject:

wizardofice
Thanks for posting this info. I would have never known about the price drop and this looks good to me. Do you have any issues with latency? If you use an inser5t on a few channels for example.
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biss · Member Joined: 13 Mar 2007 Posts: 193

At DV247 in the uk it seems that LM16 is no longer available, and there is a super offer of £219 on the LM32 until end of the line. This looks bad.
I didn't know it was going out of production.

wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

I haven't seen any sign of latency so far. I have run all 16 and it runs fine.

Yep probably going to end production and then announce something bigger and better. Good deal for me!
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biss · Member Joined: 13 Mar 2007 Posts: 193

wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

well it works with no problems. Why would I want a software update? Those usually cause problems.
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forge · Member Joined: 16 Oct 2008 Posts: 120 Location: UK

i just got rid of mine actually! only because I was having issues with FW dropouts. and to be honest. the variety of comp's en eq's was good but a little overwhelming and i didn't know where to start.

i second the hardware issues. it would be nice if the knob travel was smoother. I guess its a great deal now with the price drop. i bought it a couple of years ago at full price.

anyway, it was good whilst it lasted but now i've sold it and moved on to izotope
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wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

It is working well for me. I used a second Firewire bus just for the liquid mix and no drop outs. Yes the amount of compressors and eq's are overwhelming but I am learning. I love the LA2A and the 1176. The pultec EQH2 is also very good on bass.

I am pretty familiar with the LA2A, 1176, dbx 160 - 165, the fairchild, EL8, and the pultec from other emulations. So I work with them a bit, but I am slowly learning what the other 32 compressors and 19 eqs do.
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biss · Member Joined: 13 Mar 2007 Posts: 193

wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

Not planning to change the OS either. I use Vista because win 7 doesn't do so well for me.I figure years before I need to do that. for the price using it for 4 to 5 years is good. By then there will be something better I am sure.

I would never consider future updates as a concern for any software. Seems to me updates are not so good most of the time. Very few plug ins will have much in the way of updates. I look back and find that Melodyne Editor is the only update I have used with the exception of the Cubase 5.5 update.
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biss · Member Joined: 13 Mar 2007 Posts: 193

What I don't understand is why Focusrite abandoned it so soon. LM seems a very nice product. I have been tempted by it so many times. At the end I bought Duende instead. I am very happy with it but the technology behind LM seems very interesting. What a shame.

Mr Mahogany · Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 4:41 pm Post subject:

biss · Member Joined: 13 Mar 2007 Posts: 193

Mr Mahogany · Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 10:30 pm Post subject:

biss · Member Joined: 13 Mar 2007 Posts: 193

wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

I don't worry too much about this kind of thing. In truth any product or software could be abandand tomorrow. You never know. I will not live my life worrying about such things. Hey it works good, it is on sale at a good price and it sounds pretty good. and Focusrite is supporting it right now.
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mroekalea · Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 8:38 am Post subject:

Focusrite is still actrive in developing new versions of drivers /software.

Go to

beta.focusrite.com to see the beta software versions, also last month the liquid mix drivers where updated to version 3.0.
There is WIndows 7 64 bit support which works.

Menoj
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Mr Mahogany · Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 4:34 pm Post subject:

I got one yesterday thanks to the OP's review. Works great so far. I'm not concerned about production continuing or not. It works just fine with my 64 bit OS .
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wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

You can bet if they are dropping the product, they are about to come out with something else soon. Always best to get something like this at the end of the sales cycle than at the beginning. It has been around about 6 years or so. Most likely reason for the slow growth and popularity of this is likely due to being a firewire interface. (or possibly the $600 original price) If it was usb it would have done better.

There is a card that can extend from 16 tracks to 24 but it is $300 and I only paid $200 for the thing to begin with. If the product is discontinued maybe the price of the card will drop soon.
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Mr Mahogany · Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 11:30 pm Post subject:

I'm pretty sure the cards will blown out. The one I got at GC in Sacramento had a sale price of $325 which is what the counter person found in the price look up in their system I had to tell them it was 199 at their website.

I think it would have had more issues if it were USB and the slow acceptance is a bit because of price but also because its only EQ's and Compressors; no flashy reverb ,guitar sim as well as retro gui. Its a godsend for me so far as I use EQ and Comp far more than reverb and my Core Duo needs help.

Anyway have you found a download for emulations not on the install dvd. Want to get them all at once.
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wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

There are a few on the Focusrite website but most are about the same as already on it. There are a few new ones though.

http://www.focusrite.com/support/liquid_assets/

This page has the ones already included

http://www.focusrite.com/products/eq___compressor/liquid_mix_16

At first I was a bit disapointed with the GUI as I am used to the IK plugs that look so nice. But the one provided does have some advantages. One is the EQ's show the curve that the eq is making which is very nice to me. I never quite knew what the curve for a Pultec looked like as the cuts and boosts affect each other so much. Now it is clear to me. Another thing is by not having the fancy gui I spend less time looking at it and more time listening to the difference so I get better results.

I don't like the names they use in the gui so I made snapshots of the different compressors using the names like 1176, pultec, 670 EL8 and so forth. That way when I want a Neve I look for Neve.

Right about not having the reverbs and so forth in it. But for me I am happy with the REVerence and CSR. In truth I use compressors and reverb much more than anything else. For amp sims I use Amplitube 3 and other than that I do not use much in the way of effects.
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Beanie Brandon · Member Joined: 13 Feb 2009 Posts: 158 Location: London

Focusrite seem to be incorporating the 'Liquid Pre' DSP into their new 'Liquid Saffire 56' audio interfaces:

http://www.focusrite.com/uk/products/audio_interfaces/liquid_saffire_56

... although only a small selection, so it doesn't look like they are abandoning it entirely, perhaps there really is something new just over the horizon Wink

Beanie Brandon · Member Joined: 13 Feb 2009 Posts: 158 Location: London

wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

been around a long time...years...

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may09/articles/liquidsaffire56.htm

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep06/articles/liquidmix.htm

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul04/articles/focusriteliquid.htm

http://www.soundonsound.com/news?NewsID=11125
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Beanie Brandon · Member Joined: 13 Feb 2009 Posts: 158 Location: London

Oops! My bad. I really hadn't noticed it before Embarassed

zabukowski · Junior Member Joined: 02 Mar 2009 Posts: 19

Most of the time I use UAD-2, Nebula, PSP and LiquidMix plugins. Every mix which uses Liquid mix among other plugins, has somehow better feel (sound) to me, hard do explain.
Unbelievable value for the money IMHO. A little harder to get used to, but once you do, you will be amazed again and again. It's realy not so important to me, if this is 100% emulation.
Definatively, it has THAT sound Wink

Zabukowski
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Computer 2: Intel Core2Duo 2.4 gHz, 4 gb RAM, 2 x 250 Gb Maxtor HDD, RME Fireface 800, UAD-2 Quad, Focusrite Liquid Mix 32, Presonus Faderport, Cubase 5.1

wizardofice · Member Joined: 05 Sep 2009 Posts: 690 Location: Florida

It has a great sound. It also, due to a fairly spartan gui, causes you to use your ears more.
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