Yamaha AW4416(any reviews yet?)

[JeffT]

Anyone seen a review on one of these yet,or ready to review it yourself?I'm very interested in this machine.Also interested in going the PC route,but I keep bouncing back and forth as to what i want.Wish I could afford one of each and just use whichever I was in the mood for each day ;-).

[rickenjangle]

The AW4416 was reviewed in the March 2000 issue of EQ magazine. Also, there are some excellent materials available on Yamaha's web site, including a full-color printable PDF which makes a nice brochure detailing all of the features of the deck.

This one looks like it bears some further looking. My friend has an AKAI DPS 12 which has great sound quality but not a lot of features or storage.

By the way, I have Cakewalk pro 9 and cool edit pro on my PC and find them to be a huge hassle, which is why I'm investigating the all-in-one digital multitrackers. Unless you have a lot of time to learn (and a PC which is at least in the upper middle in terms of performance) I would not go the PC route. I think you would want a PC that is at least a Pentium III/600 with 128MB RAM and a huge, fast hard drive if you want to go the PC route. The PC would also be good if you are using a lot of sequencers and sampling. For guitar-based pop/rock stuff, IMHO, the digital multitracker is the tool of choice.

You might consider using cool edit pro on the PC as a wave editor and/or mastering software. And, if you want to give your final mixes any kind of wierd or special eq or treatment, cool edit has some neato algorithms. I also use it to clean up wave files generated from mp3's that I download, 'cause sometimes they don't come through clean for whatever reason.

[rjt]

They are currently shipping and sound pretty good. There are some minor bugs with the os, but that will probably be fixed in the downlodable upgrades. The effects units also sound good. I'm not great with mixing, but was able to figure out signal path and routings without the manual, need bit more help figuring out the recorder though. On the other BBSs, most of the other folks who have bought them like them. I think it is great to have units which work with a computer. I need portability, to move to another area to record a piano, so I record synths in the computer and accoustic instruments in whatever portable unit I have (used to be an Alesis ADAT). I think, the AW4416 will work well with the computer. I have an ADAT card installed in the AW and it is taking 3-4 tracks from the computer with no problem (on the lightpipe) while playing from a couple of the analog inputs from the back. As I said, will have to read the manual a bit more before I get into a lot of the recording functions.

[JeffT]

Thanks for the info.
rjt,
Have you run into any o.s. bugs yet?What kind of problems do they cause?

Have you heard if the O.S. upgrades are for sure going to be downloadable?I questioned Yamaha several months back about it and they led me to believe you would have to order a cd from them to upgrade the O.S.

I have been un-able to find any other bbs's that may talk about the aw4416,do you know of any specifically i could go scope out?I've searched here,the vsplanet,and musicandaudio.com.
thanks again,
JT