Mackie Mainstream

Streamers Delight

Released alongside a swathe of other innovative products from Mackie January 2024 the Mainstream is pitched front and centre to streamers. Streamers nowadays have a voracious appetite for fully formed, feature packed devices that have the smallest footprint possible. In the past you often had to connect your webcams, audio interfaces and microphones alongside an already packed desk filling up all your available USB slots making Amazon incredibly wealthy purely via USB hubs alone. Delivering a device that covers all individual pieces of hardware and more was always going to be a popular idea.

Construction

The build quality is impressive, it’s a weighty lump but still feels portable. It feels like you could drop it and the Mainstream would be fine (I would not recommend this at all). The wedge style design is sleek and practical with recessed sides for easier deployment around your desk. The front of the Mainstream is split into two distinct areas, the top area dedicated to the six backlit clicky pads. These pads are not the same as you would find on audio products like midi controllers. They are more like mouse buttons, this is however a good idea, on some of Mackie’s competitor’s products you could be fooled into thinking they had velocity driven pads because of the similarity to professional audio pads, however they are not velocity sensitive pads.

With Mackie they have designed a pretty array of single clicky buttons with a wealth of customisation accessed from the support software Mackie Matrix. Once inside the software the first six buttons represent the physical six on the device and you have two virtual buttons. Within the software you can change background colour, control type (ie play, stop, pause). You can load audio samples in, record your own audio within the matrix itself and hot key the pad to perform a function.

The lower section of the front panel is dedicated to dedicated audio controls. This might be the only criticism I have of the unit and it’s a mild one. On the front you have five control nobs that control volume and input for HDMI, mic input, PC level, headphone level and speaker volume, additionally there are also mute buttons for aux, mic, speaker, HDMI and headphones. If, however you want to control the levels of applications you have running through the matrix, this must be done within the software as there are no dedicated hardware controls. I can understand this as you can add an almost infinite amount of extra audio inputs to control, but it would have been handy to have at least controls for the first four channels. This will mean you having to alt tab out of your game or app to change volume settings (from experience once you set up your scenes correctly you won’t find yourself changing levels very often).

Now onto the juicy section, one of the main reasons you want to pick the Mainstream up is its range of inputs. Don’t get me wrong the Mainstream won’t land a Mars rover, but it will make your life easier while freeing up valuable desk space. There is a physical phantom power button so you can connect your condenser mic directly without worrying about whether it will work or not (and inside the matrix software you have a fully formed eq!). There is a combi input for mics and line level instruments. A monitor button sits at the top far left just next to the 3.5mm input for headphone monitoring. There is also a 3.5mm aux input for adding external audio. Next along is a ¾ inch headphone output and next to that are left and right speaker outputs again ¾ inch. The next section we move over to the audio video inputs.

The Mackie Mainstream is an ideal device for console gamers looking to stream, this is achieved with HDMI pass through. You plug your HDMI from the console into the HDMI in and then another HDMI from the pass through into your monitor. The mainstream then acts as a capture card (1080p at 60fps) and will output video to your monitor at 4k 60fps. This alone is pretty incredible but consider you are a pc streamer who doesn’t need it to act as a capture card, if you own a dslr and use it as a webcam you can plug the camera into the HDMI in and the mainstream will manage that camera as well. Freeing up valuable space on your motherboard. Next to the HDMI section is a USB C section. The mainstream does zero processing in this section, and it wholly acts as a USB C hub meaning you could potentially add more audio or video sources, expanding even further your streaming capabilities. Say for example you have an Elgato Facecam pro, you can pop the USB C into the hub and your PC will see it as a Facecam pro. This really takes the Mainstream into a different league of functionality freeing up even more USB ports on your motherboard. Finally, you have the USB C power, make sure you are using the latest possible USB C cable, or the one supplied with the unit as older cables can cause some issues.

Using the Mainstream

The Mackie Mainstream takes a minute (in my case a few days) to get used to and combined with the Matrix software at first, can feel overwhelming. However, it is straightforward to use and with the additional USB C ports even makes life much easier by freeing up space for other devices while leaving a relatively small footprint on your desk. I really love using mine and in conjunction with the DLZ creator (more on that in another blog) I have a powerful streaming setup and very portable podcasting setup. The standalone device itself for straight out of the box functionality is very straightforward, plug your mic in and choose “audio in mainstream” as your input device in settings and “audio out mainstream” for you output and once you set your desired level you are good to go. It would be criminal to leave it at that! The matrix software massively expands the use of the hardware. You can create 4 distinct scenes with an almost infinite number of channels (very similar to how you build scenes in OBS). You then adjust the levels within each scene for each channel and then in OBS add you audio inputs and choose your preferred streaming mix or recording mix or any complicated variant of the available mixes. I will do a separate blog covering the Mackie Matrix software as there is a lot of ground to cover. If you need more info about the Mackie Mainstream please follow the link below.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/mackie-mainstream-live-streaming-and-video-capture-interface