1010music bluebox

It's really hard to give a one-word evaluation of the sound because the internal sound quality is quite superb, it has great dynamic range without distortion, the effects are difficult to dial, but pretty great quality, and overall it behaves quite nicely. But

But it's really really sensitive to bad power. It may turn off on you if you use a lesser cable, and there's ground noise if your setup is kinda finicky. Right now I have a base noise that's quite noticeable if gain or volume are to high in some tracks or master, but it's quite manageable since you can get good quality sound with lower levels. I'm sure if I took the time to find what's the source of the noise issues I'd be able to clean it up.

One more issue is that the inputs are too close together, so you need good quality cables with small tips.

All things considered, it packs a lot in a very small package, and can handle from instrument to eurorack levels, so if desktop real state is an issue and you want flexibility, it's a good choice.

Unfortunately, very expensive for a mixer with few input channels, not the best handling compared to typical analog mixers and mini TRS connectors. It’s obvious that this company plans to market to EURO rack people. but even as a mixer for a small synthesizer sum in this format um in others, it’s far too expensive and not sufficient for the price. I know EURO correct people are happy to pay the money as long as they can add another unit and there is unit where the price is absolutely worth the money but I don’t see this is one of them for the price that is far better, digital and analog mixers or interfaces with DC coupled outputs.

i’m currently designing my own matrix mixer, DC coupled and as an open hardware project with optional 2520 DOA opamps, DIYRE color plug in slots, as well as instrument input for hiZ on a few input channels. I’ve been thinking about the 16 X 16 matrix, which is easy to build and even using the best burr brown / Texas instruments opamps getting 10 to 30 units produced and with high-quality assembled in China apart from a few specific parts that I will solder on my own unit price using the best opamps fully balanced and DC coupled tantalum, or film resistors, and WIMA capacitors the price without housing, including shipping and customs will be less than €30 apiece. I’m still looking for good housing vendors, but found a few. From most people are not into electronics this might be surprising: 3-D printed, aluminum or pedals iron housing. I actually some of the most expensive parts during production and sample pre-runs. always the real cost lies in the research and development mistakes on the way and improvements until you ever finished product. This is why mixers like this one as well as others have their price. There’s a few good DJ or eight to 12 channel analog mixers no they usable and cost less than 600to €700. Better ones are easily above €1000 especially with decent housing and very good faders or knobs that will last in club environments for a few years at least. I still have my A&H xone42 – first version of the product from almost 15 years ago working great. I’ve since been looking for analog mixer for live acts as well ideally incorporating a 500 series rack for preamps bus compressors, and high-quality EQs among mastering chains.

Before getting the bluebox, if I wanted to record a jam or similar, I needed to plug all the synths into my line mixer, fire up the daw, set up a session, etc etc.

With this, I literally wake it up and hit record. Brilliant box, massive timesaver and means I can record whatever I'm doing whenever I want.

Sound quality is good, haven't had any noise issues. The supplied microSD card needs replacing, and the new firmware allows you to use it as an interface, which is insane for the price. It takes up very little room too, which was a huge bonus.

Be warned about the cable size though - the cheap cordial cables I bought needed cutting down in order to get them to fit properly!

Its small, well built, lots of inputs and perfect handling for the most basic set of features (naming tracks and flexible input assignment are huge)

On the other hand, the menus and the placement of the knobs are not very self-explanatory, and it's missing a small but critical feature: the ability to replay in loops the captured wav files. They might think that this will undermine the Blackbox sales, but what's surprising is that the latest Blackbox firmware lacks this feature in reality as well!

If that was present I would give it a shining 5-star review. Otherwise a solid small powerful mixer, with fair (but not top of the notch) recording capabilities