Well, wow. We installed the new Yamaha M7CL console and the Aviom monitor system last week, and they are just flat-out amazing. The console is a brilliant live console, it gives you lots of power, lots of routing control, great effects, and gets out of your way. The most surprising change after installing the new board is the quality of the sound. It is unquestionably superior to the Ramsa DA-7 (Panasonic) we had before. Huge, noticeable difference. I very much doubt that it's simply the move to 48kHz (from 44.1). The preamps have gotta be better, along with the D/A conversion in general.
Before I blab on ad nauseum about the console, a few words about Aviom monitors: run, don't walk, to the store, and buy them. Pay extra for them. Send them money for no reason! Avioms work like this: you send up to 16 separate channels of audio through one cat5 cable to the stage, and then you either chain the individual monitor units (w/ cat5) or you have a distributor. The distributor puts power on the cat5, so each unit doesn't need its own wall wart. But best of all, each monitor unit allows each user to mix their own monitor mix... they can individually control volume and pan (or stereo image width, for stereo sends) for each of the up to 16 channels.
More after the link...
The Avioms are crystal clear and every musician loved them, they couldn't say enough good things. Our Aviom channel setup is: 4 vocals (2-3 typically in use), 2 mono guitars, 1 stereo lead guitar, 1 mono keyboards, 1 mono bass, 1 mono reverb, 1 mono extra (loop, another guitar, whatever etc.), 1 mono reverb, 1 stereo house mics, 1 stereo drums submix. It's awesome.
So more about the console: 48 channels, 48 faders in groups of 8, 16 mixes, 8 matrixes, 16 analog omni outs, built-in Rev-X processor (in virtual rack), large touchscreen display. Parametric EQ (4 band + HPF) and two dynamics processors per channel. Everything is fully patchable, so you can route anything anywhere, or to multiple anywheres (e.g. I have a two stereo channels for one musician who plays both acoustic and electric through the same processing unit... I have different EQs and reverb settings for them, so I just made them into two channels, and switching guitars is as easy as switching which channel is active).
The most interesting thing about the console is the "Centralogic" design. You have 48 normal faders, but then you also have 8 faders in the Centralogic section. This section is assigned to control any one of the groups of 8 faders at a time, and gives you a combined physical and digital channel strip, from fader all the way up to head amp (Yamaha for preamp). Pushing the button for any group of 8 faders brings those faders up in the Centralogic section, along with all the channel settings such as EQ, dynamics, mix/matrix send levels, head amp, etc. This design keeps the console simple and more compact than any other 48 fader board I've seen, and it also preserves something of the feel of an analog board, where you have everything in a channel strip. Of course, the on-screen portion of the strip can be "touched" (what do you call using a touch screen?) and a large window will appear for whatever you touched on (e.g. EQ, dynamics, input patch, etc.).
Using the board, everything is intuitive, you "touch" on things on screen to change them, etc. The board has 3 slots for processing or I/O cards, we're using two of them for ADAT digital outs (32 total) for recording, and then one for the Aviom card, so we have our 16 Aviom sends built right into the board. My only complaints so far (and they're very minor) are that you can't pull a matrix up on faders, only mixes (why?!). This is mildly irritating since we're using all 16 mixes for the Avioms, so I'm running reverb and delay off matrix channels. The other complaints is that the "fixed" bus send mode is post-fader and unconfigureable (gah!). Not a huge deal, but it would've been nice for most of the Aviom sends to be on/off instead of levels. Oh well.
Anyway... I absolutely love the board, it's fantastic. I'll update this if I think of any other interesting details.
