Digital Music Corporation MX-8

This is an article culled from archive material, circa 1997.

One of the first and best-known MIDI patchbays, certainly in the US, owing its success, at least in my opinion, to the fact that it makes no attempt to be clever. It's primarily a 6-input, 8-output passive patchbay (which means no interference or screw-ups), but there are two virtual "processors" which provide simple MIDI processing (channelising, delays, filtering, keyboard splits and so on); in addition, the processors can be configured to provide 2-into-1 merging.

The great benefit of this unit is its stupidity; with the MIDI processors offline there is no firmware to get things wrong, although I never had any problems with it even using the processors. A couple of minor drawbacks: firstly, it is rather opaque to programme, and it takes considerable clarity of thought to quickly comprehend displays like

IN  21M2A131  1>A
OUT 12345678  2>B

Secondly, the unit transmits All Notes Off to all outputs when it receives a program change to select configuration (which must be sent to a processor); it is therefore not always possible to keep a virtual connection running while changing configuration.

This kind of device is all but obsolete these days, due to the emergence of computer-based multiport interfaces, but given the general flakiness of the latter, the MX-8 does have a certain appeal.