Yamaha AW4416.

Audio quality is fine. 24 bit is superb for the price. Compressors are cleaner than most of my rack mount stuff. EQ is typical for this class of gear. User interface takes while to learn, but when you get it, you can move fast. It is "intuitive".

The big problem is backup options. It takes way more and 10 gig to back up a 10 gig disk. WAY more. Priced 100 gig of scsi lately? Backup is slow. Restore is slow. Its one big expensive pain in the ass. You need an expensive tape back up unit to make this work for any production work.

I'm not clear why they offer xlr inputs at all. The other inputs are balanced 1/4 inch. The xlr inputs are not mic pre’s – while they might work with a very hot mic but they don’t sound good and they don’t have much gain.

I understand if you install the Waves y56 card - which, if it sounds anything like their plugin's has got to be a great deal - that you can not use the other slot. Maybe this has been fixed. In any case, it needs more io.

Every so often a channel just dies. I have to boot it to bring the channel back. Huge pain and not ok in a professional machine. New release didn't fix it. I can't imagine the Roland is any better - but Roland does know software.

My problem with Roland is that they "feature" their gear to death, go high tech, and then obsolesce their loyal customer's gear in a year. I'll never buy another Roland anything as long as I live. They reward their customers by screwing them. Hey Roland, can you say "upgrade path? Even Microsoft knows about that.

The reverbs are pretty nice depending on the source and parameters. Yamaha reverbs are great. Ask any old FOH guy. These sound similar to some of the Yamaha classic rack mount stuff.

The board fan and the CDR fan make more noise than they should. Come on, Yamaha. You save a dollar on a fan and make the thing unusable except in a control room? In case you didn't get the right focus group, I'll just tell you straight out: These devices are used for recording sounds, and normally the sound of the fan is not what I like to record. Do you have any sound engineers around who might find a way to make this quieter? Or do you assume every home studio has a separate control room? What? This is just pure brain-dead on the part of the engineering people at Yamaha. Maybe they should hire me.

Seriously, I disabled the fan in the CDR and it helped a lot. Of course I do not recommend that anyone do this because that would expose me to legal liability and…. Oh, what the hell. Just do it.

The MMC implementation is a little scarey. I guess it works with all the right interfaces but it has caused me a little pain.

All the digital io is fine. Dithers good. My other spdif interfaces work with it. Its never lost a track. Even when the channel died while recording the performance was preserved. The track editing is difficult and pointless. Just move the stuff over to a computer. If the UI were better I might like it - but as it is it’s a pain. The pitch shift is a joke. I've used 'em all (Eventide, etc etc.) and this one is kinda stupid sounding. Grainy - low fi.

Beware of two things. 1 is the simultaneous track utilization in 24 bit mode. You'd be surprised what you can't do. The next is that the quick record mode mutes all the channels. It takes a minute to figure out why if you don't use that function very often.

Overall this is a class bit of audio gear at a great price - and I'd be happy using it in critical application if they could only explain the channel drop. I think I might be causing it by pressing buttons too fast – but that should not happen.