Works exactly as it should. Almost superhuman. Futuristic. An Oracle?
These rack ears work exactly as they are supposed to. You must remove (unscrew) the plastic sides from your Mackie mixer (pictured, disconnected and resting on top of rack ears) and then attach the ears in their place, using the threaded bolt holes left by the mixer plastic side guards. Perfect fit. No complaints. Ears attach within 1mm perfect spacing. Simple product, no moving or electronic parts to "break." What you see is what you get. A good tip is to wire up your mixer (with a patch panel) so you arent pulling and inserting cables into the mixer all day every day. The connections stay with the mixer, and are plugged at the other end in the patchbay. The gear plugs in and out of the patchbay, no harm- no foul to the mixer.<br /><br />Pictured is my mixer on top of a rolling rack that has an adjustable, angled top- another ergonomical advantage. While I am at it, this rack was bought here on Amazon as well and is solid as a rock. If you need to move around your rack once in a while, this is the way to do it- in lieu of pulling your hair out when you unplug every connection, move your rig and either can't reach or can't remember where to plug in the myriad of cables. With a dozen inputs, a dozen inserts, 48 front patch positions, as well as 48 rear patch positions, audio interfaces, secondary and third level mixers, amplifiers, distribution amplifiers, humbuckers, effect pedals, power conditioners, two dozen pieces of vintage gear without all the modern amenities, MIDI spaghetti, MIDI interfaces, USB & USB3 running in and out of gear and the PC, perhaps a secondary PC just to record? Maybe even a PC to just record dry multitrack! Powered monitors, passive monitors feeding off amplifiers, casual entertainment from secondary and third level laptops, single board computers, refurbished PCs with a SSD, a GPU and massive memory dumped in to make it nothing more than a fancy HD internet streaming device. Possibly able to record with some big drives and a stripped down OS.<br /><br />The short story is (TOO LATE!) the rack ears not only save space, they open up either the top or the vertical side of the mixer in order to make it more available for multiple uses by keeping the clutter behind, to the side, and generally out of the way- while you, the engineer, are trying to figure out a solution, not trying to get tangled in a spaghetti of wires and cables.<br /><br />Sure, color coded cables help. Those little numbered decals at either end of cables near the jack can help. Not without a key of some sort though. If you've got all the codes on a piece of paper, it's hard to make mistakes. It's even harder to try to hold on to a cheat sheet, while holding tools, cables, balancing on your back, with a flashlight in your mouth.<br /><br />Work smarter…. not harder!
Rating: 5 stars