Mackie DL806
An eight-channel digital mixer that lives inside an iPad - and asks you to trust a dock connector with your whole gig.
Overview
Around 2013, a lot of small-venue engineers were asking the same thing: what if the mixer were just a box of preamps and converters, and the control surface were the iPad already in the bag? The DL806 is Mackie's answer. It is the eight-channel sibling of the DL1608, with the same feature set as the sixteen-channel version in a smaller, cheaper package. It is aimed squarely at small-venue and acoustic gigging, and it gives you total control from the Apple iPad. Street price landed under $1,000.
Because the mix lives on the tablet and not on a physical console, the DL806 supports monitoring from a docked iPad and, wirelessly, from up to ten additional iPads. For a bar band or a solo acoustic act, that's a different workflow. The engineer can walk the room with the mix in hand instead of standing behind a desk. Mackie's own marketing billed the DL806 as offering total control from the Apple iPad, and Mix (March 2013, p.61) reported the launch alongside the company's DLM-series powered loudspeakers.
The trade-off comes with the concept. Faders, EQ, aux sends - everything you'd normally reach for is behind glass, so the mixer is only as good as the tablet docked to it and the app running on it. The dock is the weak link in any iPad-based rig of this generation. The 30-pin-to-Lightning transition was churning through the iOS world in 2012 and 2013. Check the connector first on any used unit. A DL806 with a tired dock is a doorstop until it's sorted.
Period coverage makes the DL806's place in Mackie's lineup clear. It's the little brother to the DL1608, sharing the iPad-control concept at half the channel count. It competed in the small live controllers/mixers category, up against the Allen & Heath MixWizard4 analog and Yamaha's MGP32X/MGP24X. In the 29th Annual TEC Awards nominees, the DL806 did not appear among the Outstanding Technical Achievement nominees.
Buying one today is a niche proposition. The DL806 is a period piece of the iPad-as-mixer moment, and its value depends on whether you can still run the control app on hardware that talks to that dock. When it works, you get eight Onyx pres and wireless multi-iPad monitoring for under a grand. When the dock or the app compatibility fails, you have a nicely built chassis and a problem.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.