holy gawd this thing is massive....I had no idea. I love the "ON" buttons, they're great. the sliders are dank, and the layout and the meters are very nice. the effects are pretty good too, that was unexpected. I haven't done any A/B's with the preamps yet so I don't want to say anything there. but I would expect they are solid for about $50 per channel. the summing is good. like I said I can't really speak for the pres or the eq really but after 1 project I'm not dissapointed..I am still very excited about this desk. the one thing that really pisses me off though is this excerpt from the product description:
"14 buses offer convenient routing options. These include the main program bus; 4 stereo channel bus pairs for grouping channels, 6 aux buses (4 pre or post, 2 effects sends), and 2 internal effect buses for the dual effects processors. "
either this is simply not true, or I am missing something. From what I can tell, it does not have 4 stereo channel bus pairs. it has 4 mono groups that can be panned. so you really get 2 stereo groups. I had wanted an 8 bus mixer, and I was willing to settle for 4 stereo busses, but this is really a 4 bus. still, the mackie 8 bus is about 4x the price and people say they break so I'm probably going to keep this one. It is, very nice.