The beast is surely a lot of chips. So? How does it sound? The reviews are interesting. The price was a bit of a shock, though I admit that Mackie could build something worth $125/ch.
> using a couple of transistors is not discrete
Traditionally, it made more sense to get your huge-area input devices from the transistor catalog than to spend a lot of IC area on just two of the dozen transistors. Or rather: it costs like $100,000 to move a chip from idea to warehouse, and nobody in the audio racket ever has $100,000 to spare, expecially when a $2/each solution exists, annual demand is under 10,000 units, and audio makers hate to be locked into sole-source parts (because they don't have the buying clout to make a source jump).
So even two $0.29 "discrete" transistors promised better results than using NE5532 (or TL072! I've seen it done).
TI and THAT have chips that can do very well, though long-term production of ANY audio-only chip is always dubious (audio tends to be a small, fragmented, and faddish world). The TI part needs computer control; with eight preamps in a $999 box that's trivial.