Tascam M164 UF 16-Channel Mixer w/ Digital FX & USB 2.0 Interface

Tascam M164-UF

First of all I feel it\'s worth a mention that the delivery time for this item was only two (working) days, which is impressive. Nice one Dolphin. now we come to the mixer itself, which feels and looks quite old school, which we have come to expect from Tascam. Overall build quality is pretty good. Faders feel a little cheap but for the price tag this is to be expected. Swithched it on, everything worked fine, so far so good. Then came he nasty business of hooking it up to he PC. Now I should explain if you have a 64 bit OS ie vista or win 7 his thing may not work well at all unless you download he current drivers from Tascam. In my case it did not work at all with the Cubase LE provided, despite all my best efforts and nearly a week of tinkering the connection just crashed my brand new PC every time. Instead I have reverted to using an older PC running windows XP which works fine. (I also have a friend a friend who runs one of these with garageband on a mac and has had no problems). The sound is very clear, with no hiss a all and the connection seems to run very smoothly, although I have only had six channels running simultaneously. It is also worth pointing out that I have not yet found a way of sending the onboard FX to the PC, although Cubase has ample. The controls are intuitive, simple to use, although individual mute/solo buttons on channel strips would have been nice. Overall then, this is a bargain for anyone with a home studio or for rehearsal spaces and is ideal for live recordings as it is reasonably portable and will plug straight into a laptop and a feed off the sound desk. Could well be a little tricky o set up but once you\'re there it\'s great. Hope this helps,
Mick