Leave it to EveAnna Manley and her chief designer, Hutch, to destroy the concept of the line mixer. They got this one all wrong. Line mixers are supposed to be ugly, lightweight, lo-fi, utilitarian units that cram 16,821 inputs into a two-rackspace chassis. Heavy, elegant and offering absolutely sparkling audio quality, the Manley 16×2 mixer started out as a 16-input/2-bus line mixer, but is also offered in two other versions, with either eight or 16 line/mic inputs.

To keep the 16×2 from becoming a 40-rackspace/400-pound behemoth, the unit's vacuum tubes are supplemented by high-quality ICs from Burr Brown and Linear Technology. From the thick, milled-slab, five-rackspace front panel and massive outboard power supply to its use of quality (read: expensive) components, the 16×2 was built for no-compromise performance.

I checked out the “8+8” model with eight mic/line inputs and eight line channels. The mic inputs have Neutrik Combo XLR/TRS jacks, insert and direct out jacks, and phantom power — switchable via locking toggle switches. The front panel has illuminated mute/solo switches, rotary pan/level pots, an 11-step gain switch with a 60dB range, and inset switches for phase reverse and insert in/out. The line channels are similar but lack the phase/insert switches and insert jacks, and substitute an aux send in place of the gain control.

The master section has the stereo bus out level pot, aux return pot, dual VU meters, and control room level control with -15dB attenuator, five-position monitoring source selector, and a switch for routing the CR out to main or small speakers. More than a simple line mixer, the 16×2 offers everything you need to do for an entire session, an essential tool for everyday production.

One of my sessions on the 16×2 was recording a jazz quartet live to 30 ips 2-track. The drums were miked with two Royer SF-1 ribbons as overhead XYs; an Audix D4 on kick; AKG C-414s on piano (half-stick lid with blanket covering); and Sennheiser 409 on the guitar amp and bass through a Summit tube direct box. After inserting a UREI compressor on bass and taking the direct outs of the piano to feed a Lexicon 200 reverb (returned through the line inputs), the results were smokin' — transparent, dynamic and clean, with left/right separation you could really hear. Of course, the mixer's huge headroom, 100kHz bandwidth and nonexistent noise floor played no small part in the results.

The 16×2 was equally useful on bread-and-butter duties such as providing eight channels of superb mic preamps for tracking, or as an ultra-fidelity submixer for mixing Pro Tools sessions right from the outs of my 888|24s converters — offering the best of both worlds, bumping the mix performance way up while providing access to plug-ins, editing, etc.

Retailing at $9,000 (line version); $9,500 8+8 (line/mic); and $9,900 for the all-mic version, the 16×2 is not exactly cheap. But with excellent mic preamps and mixer/submixer flexibility, the 16×2 is useful on every session, making it way more affordable than some digital doohickey that gets fired up once a month.