Alesis MasterLink ML-9600
A hard-disk recorder, mastering suite, and CD burner in one box. It let project studios put "mastered" on the sleeve without a second mortgage.
Overview
The MasterLink ML-9600 is a two-track mixdown deck that also edits, processes, and burns the finished disc. That was the pitch Alesis made, and for a lot of home and project studios it landed. The unit combines stereo hard-disk recording, CD burning, DSP, and mastering functions in a single chassis. It writes standard "Red Book" 16-bit/44.1 kHz CDs and Alesis's own high-resolution CD24 format at 24-bit/96 kHz. The company's advertising billed it as "a complete mastering house in a box" - the machine that does everything but deliver your demo to the A&R guys. That's marketing copy, but the feature list behind it was real.
The converters are where owners start when they defend the thing. They are 24-bit, 128x oversampling A/D/A converters. The analog front end offers both balanced XLR and unbalanced RCA connectors, alongside AES/EBU (XLR) and coaxial S/PDIF digital I/O. A quarter-inch headphone out with its own level control rounds out the connections. The published frequency response reaches up to 20-40k Hz, and the signal-to-noise ratio is rated at 113dB (A-weighted). Those numbers put the box in professional territory rather than the project-studio compromise bracket.
Recording resolution is flexible. The MasterLink supports 16-, 20-, and 24-bit wordlengths at 44.1, 48, 88.2, and 96 kHz sample rates, with built-in sample rate conversion and noise shaping to move material between them. The internal drive is a 3.2GB IDE unit. That's modest by later standards, but enough for serious two-track work. Burning runs at 4x on standard CD-Rs. CD24 is an AIFF-compatible file format readable on MacOS, Windows, and Unix platforms, so the high-res output isn't a proprietary dead end.
The editing and finishing tools are what separate the MasterLink from a plain CD recorder. Gain control, cropping to adjust start and end points, and join/split functions for combining or separating song sections are all onboard, along with normalization and peak limiting. There's a three-band fully parametric EQ for fine-tuning individual songs, plus compression, limiting, and normalization to shape dynamics. Playlist management is generous: up to 16 playlists, each holding as many as 99 tracks, with full control of song order, per-track gain, fades, and start times. The playlists act as pointers to the underlying data, so tracks can overlap between lists without duplicating audio. An infrared remote control and rackmount brackets are included.
Period coverage treated it as a serious tool rather than a toy. Audio Express (April 2004, p.49) reviewed the ML-9600 as a high-resolution two-track hard-disk mixing and mastering recorder. It noted the unit can record from analog, AES/EBU (XLR), and S/PDIF (coax) digital inputs, or from its internal optical drive, all to the internal hard drive. Pro Audio Review (May 2003, p.76) framed it as the machine that finally let engineers walk away from DAT. It called it a 24/96 stereo hard-disk recorder, mastering suite, and CD burner in one, with non-destructive playlists saving fades, gain, and start times per track, plus the compression and parametric EQ that carry a final mix to a finished master. All of it could be burned to Red Book or CD24 discs on inexpensive CD-Rs. The same review noted a 20GB drive variant offering almost 30 hours of recording, so drive capacity evidently changed across the production run. The manual-era documentation lists the 3.2GB IDE drive.
Retailer material from the period lists the ML9600 at a suggested $1,699 with a street figure around $999. For a box replacing a DAT machine, an outboard processor chain, and a CD burner, that was the whole argument. Alesis ran a Studiologic rebate promotion requiring sales receipts dated between November 2000 and January 2001, which places the unit firmly in that window of the market.
The editing workflow, designed around a front-panel interface rather than a computer screen, feels deliberate and slow next to a DAW, though that's precisely the point for anyone who wants to master without booting a session. The MasterLink earned its reputation honestly — a genuinely versatile and affordable all-in-one for everyone from large commercial facilities down to recording musicians, as the original literature put it — and the ones still running are running because someone kept them running.
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