Well,
my ZOOM R16 came in yesterday. Last night I spent about an hour with it...getting it installed and configured with Sonar 8.
I'm still having some problems with Sonar 8....I'll get the ASIO drivers installed....Sonar will pick them up and everything's fine. If I close Sonar, it cant find the drivers when I open it again.

I can go to the Options tab in Sonar, and switch the driver to WDM, apply, then switch it back to ASIO, apply, and it picks them right up again. Weird. I think it's a Sonar issue and not a R16 issue.
First thoughts on the R16... on a 1-10 scale. 10 = rocks.
8 *Chassis/Build. Dont use this thing in a steady breeze....it's incredibly lightweight. The pots and faders feel nice and firm and linear...buttons seem to be stable and not wiggle around much. Should hold up to moderate use. The LCD display leaves a bit to be desired...but I'm spoiled by that huge display on
my Fantom G6.
7 *FX...I didn't get to the guitar effects, but the general reverbs and choruses seem ok. The verbs aren't great, but they're serviceable. Tons of comp presets to explore as well as some multiFX patches. Nice flexibility in routing..with some of the FX dedicated as inserts.
6 *Preamps seem to be a little thin...I don't know yet as I haven't spent alot of time with them. I just plugged a SM57 into each to verify signal. There are some preamp models in the FX insert list. Should be interesting.
8 *DAW interface. After I got Sonar to read the drivers, installing the R16 as a interface was a snap. Works very well...latency is undetectable right now. It seems to really stomp my CPU though. I loaded up an old project....12 tracks with some automation, and quite a few plugs. The CPU load seemed to settle into the 60% range but I did see it hit 70-80% loads. That's alittle troubling. Sure, I've got a crappy processor (Celeron 2.3ghz), but this same project didn't move that cpu above 20% when I was using my old 8x2 interface. I've got some more time to spend with it tonight, so I'll be tweaking the settings to see if I can get that usage down some.
7 *Control Surface. Very easy to install. The disk came with a R16 VST plug for Sonar. Sonar picked it up with out any trouble. This was the easiest part of the installation process. As a control surface, it's pretty rudimentary. It does have dedicated transport controls with a very usable jog wheel...+10. Faders feel nice and firm with no noticable lag between the control surface move and the corresponding move in Sonar. It has several hotkeys that can be assigned to various tasks...I haven't set them up yet. Each channel has a solo button that I think can be configured to arm a track for recording as well. I'll learn more about that functionality tonight.
? *Recorder. I haven't used it yet to record to it's SDHC slot. I can get almost 400 minutes 8 tracks at 16/44.1 on a 16gb card. I'll explore this this weekend. I've got a remote to do...I'm bringing the laptop, but I might just record onto the SD.
7.5So, overall, it seems to be a pretty nice unit that doesn't excel at anything, but does a nice job at many different things. I can rate it higher once I figure out why it's beating up my CPU and add some functionality to the control surface, hopefully, with some hotkey assigns....things like Pan, FX send, return levels, would be cool to control with the jog wheel.