Thoughts on digital mixers

[jjmanton2]

Hey everyone,
Im in the market for a digital mixer and wanted some quick opinions before i went any further and spent money only to later regret it. I have been looking at the soundcraft digital 328 (my favorite but no longer in production), the yamaha 01v and the tascam DM24. I would like to know which one has the best A/d conversion, mic pre's, and overall best sound. I havent heard any of these units because my local music store doesnt carry any so im kinda going into this blindly. I like the soundcraft but im worried about it no longer being in production if im buying old and out of date hardware. What opinions do you guys have on these devices or any other digital mixers with the same capabilities?
Thanks

[Blue Bear Sound]

A colleague of mine had the DM24 and it was quite a reasonable-sounding board.... I can't speak about the others since I haven't heard them!

[Harvey Gerst]

The DM24 mixing board is a great sounding board. It's a bitch and a half to use.
Love the sound - hate the board!!

[SonicAlbert]

I own a DM-24, and actually used to have two of them cascaded. It was a bit rough to get around on at first, but now that I know the board it's easy. Really easy and well laid out actually. You do have to get past the learning curve though, and until you do it can be frustrating.

Also, none of the boards you are considering are still in production. I'm a bit biased I suppose, but I'd say go for the DM-24 as it really does sound excellent for a low cost digital board.

[jjmanton2]

so you would say the audio quality is definately there? that was my main concern because i have never delt with tascam before. I know soundcraft is good quality. do you think having it no longer in production would be a problem?

[bigwillz24]

One of my teachers uses the o1v. It sounds good to me and he reccomends it all the time as an "great sounding easy to use board". Only thing is I've always seen him use them for live sound not recording. In his studio he uses 2 O2r's.

[jjmanton2]

unfortunately 2 o2r's arent in my budget right now. I think ive kind of ruled out the 01v because you are right, i think it is more geared toward live sound than recording. Still havent heard any comments on the soundcraft. I wanna know if it is as good as it looks on paper. One thing i like about the soundcraft that the DM24 doesnt have is more adat. I want to run it into my frontier dakota card and sync with spdif. the 328 also saves 100 scenes while the DM24 only saves 8. But from what i can tell, the DM24 kicks the crap outa the 328 effects wise. I have no idea what to do.

[photoresistor]

look into the panasonic ramsa da7. everything ive heard has been that its just simply a better sounding board than the dm24 and the yammies. i dont have first hand experience in this but i will know what thte day sounds like in about a week as i just bought one off ebay for about $1000 fully loaded. These used to go for almost $10000 with everything im told.

but yeah, check out www.da7.com... the board came out in 1999 so its a little bit older probably than some and it HAS been discontinued in north america. but for me, the only issue was how it performed and how it sounds and all the discontinued means to me is that its in my price range.

[SonicAlbert]

You can get ADAT cards for the DM-24, as it has two expansion slots. Or you can get TDIF to ADAT converters and use the three TDIF I/O ports for ADAT.

Also, the DM-24 has 100 memory slots for mix snapshots. These save every setting of the mix.

At the time I bought my DM-24 all the other mixers under discussion here were still in production. The DM-24 has a few really good features the others don't. It can do 24/96k for example. It also has touch sensitive faders, which is a feature I personally love. There is also a lot more I/O built in standard on the DM-24 than the others. But if you can find a 328 or DA7 fully loaded, then that's certainly something worth considering.

The DM-24 can also be used as a virtual controller for DAW's, it has great automation and MIDI machine control. Lots of features when you dig into it. The overall design is just a little bit more updated than the other mixers you are looking at from that period, although I know the DA7 has a strong following as well.

[fraserhutch]

I have the DM24, and will second what SonicAlbert has stated.

I have an ADAT card, works like a champ.

I also have the firewire card that gives me 24 tracks in/out of my daw via a firewire interface.

Another thing I found is that if you get a decent word clock and slave the DM24 to it, you can really improve the performance of the convertors, too.