Greg Mackie, President and CEO of Mackie Designs, opened the session by welcoming the 70+ attendees to the Mackie training studio located in the Mackie manufacturing plant in Woodinville, Washington, a half hour outside of Seattle.

David Scheirman, Section chairman, raffled off some door prizes to attendees, then narrated slides of the most recent AES convention in New York. In among the slides we saw photos of local AES section members and representatives of local area audio manufacturing companies.

Bob Dougherty, Chairman of the Seattle chapter of the Acoustical Society of America, addressed the session. He informed us about what ASA was about and told of us some upcoming joint AES and ASA meetings. Acoustical Society of America. 

Keith Medley, Training Director at Mackie, introduced Bob Tudor, Software Director at Mackie Designs and chief programmer of the Digital 8 Bus.

Tudor presented the technical details and demonstrated a beta version of the Mackie Digital 8 Bus mixing console. It is based on a Pentium platform for which they wrote an entire new operating system. The console uses standard upgradeable and replaceable computer components such as the mouse, keyboard, CPU, memory, hard drive, and floppy drive. It also has a built in SVGA output for a computer video monitor. The console can be run with or without an external video monitor.

Tudor boasted that the console has a dial-up internal modem. The console could call the Mackie factory, send its account and version number, and upload any new versions of the operating software all while continuing its duties as a digital mixing console.

The console contains 25 DSPs which can handle one billion instructions per second at 32 bits. The eight main output busses can be dedicated to support Left, Center, Right, 5.1 and 7.1 configurations. 5.1 means 5 surround sound channels with a sub woofer output. 7.1 means 7 surround sound channels with a sub woofer output.

The console also features direct routing architecture so that it is not necessary to use a bus to assign a track to a specific tape out. Other features are 48 input channels, 16 internal effects returns, and 12 aux busses. It is intended to sell for less than $10k, and should be the first in a family of digital mixers.

After the main demonstration of the 8 Bus console some of the attendees went into the control room to see a demonstration of the Mackie HR824 powered monitor speakers and the HUI. The HUI is a human interface unit for Digidesign recording systems. Finally, attendees enjoyed snacks (courtesy of Mackie) and sodas, and many of the attendees went on tours of the manufacturing facilities.