Best In Class!

I purchased this mixer from Sweetwater a little over a year ago and have been very impressed with it since the day I received it. In addition to all of the other great features, I love the large, user friendly, menu driven screen and DAW Control Surface ability with lightning fast faders that works great with all of the top DAW apps.. I also love the fact that it's still made in Japan and not China. At least mine was. The build quility is unbeatable as well.

The Best for The Price

I have been looking to upgrade my recording board for some time. I contacted Dave Walent, and he recommended the Yamaha 01V96VCM. He said that the 01V96VCM has been an industry standard and a lot of music has been recorded on this board. I read many reviews on the 01V96VCM and decided to give it a try, so I went ahead and order the board. Let’s set the tone here, I use a digital mixer (will not say what other brand) and a Mackie HDR 24/96 hard disk recorder for recording on all my previous music. I was having fun, but always lacked the more open / clear sound that I was looking for. As soon as I fired some songs that were previously recorded thru this board I noticed a difference right away. I could hear the bass and a lot of mud had disappeared. Again, this is on music that was recorded with a not so good board. Mixing was much easier because I could hear the music. I quickly burned a CD thru my masterlink and to the car I went. The CD in the car sounded great and what I heard in the studio monitors is what I was hearing in the car. Thank goodness!!!! Did I say reverbs and delays? The reverbs and delays that come with this board are outstanding. If you do not have good effects get this board. The VCM effects are way better than what I was using before and for the price of this board it is a steal. Did I mention Compression? There actually three different compressors that can be used. I like the idea that there are presets on the compressors that I can use and tweak to perfection. Did I say EQ? There are three different EQs that can be used and again can be tweaked to perfection. Did I say limiter? I run some recorded drums thru this board with the limiter on and started turning up the gain on the channel. The sound got bigger and bigger without clipping the board. This is going to work great when recording drummers that start playing light and get louder as they warm up. I have only touched on some of the capabilities of this board, because it would take too long to go thru every detail. One thing I will tell you, read the owner’s manual. This board can be overwhelming if you don’t know anything about mixing boards. I owned a digital board for 10 years prior to purchasing the 01V96VCM, and it still took me a couple of weeks (during the evenings) to master all the features that this board has. If you stick with it, you will come to realize what a great piece of gear this board is. The 01V96VCM (with all of its features), a couple of good microphones, and an alternate preamp to change up the textures on a few of the tracks and you are good to go. If the talent was right, this board is all you would need to produce a high quality musical CD. Money is tight these days and the Yamaha 01V96VCM is hands down the best way to add a lot power to a studio without breaking the bank. There may be better boards out there, but who could afford them.

Excelent digital mixer!

I have been using an HD24 ADAT based recording system for several years now with high-end analog recording console. I recently switched over to the O1V96v2 with the ADAT expansion card so that I could connect the HD24 direct digital. The pre's on this mixer are great! The FX are nice and there are 4 independant processors. Routing capability is amazing, and the computer software that lets you see and change things in real-time is a true time saver! If you are thinking about this mixer, go for it! You won't be disapointed. It seriously lightened my load for mobile recording jobs and is one powerful production tool.

good choice

i work with international music projects(produce, mix...) and in one of our studios we have a 01v mixer. we only use the adat input(summing) and i love it. its fast. fx and eq are ok. the compender work well. but forget the analog side(thin and cold). for sure i prefer my ssl matrix a lot more but for the price the o1v is amazing.

An amazing console for professional use

The 01V96 is an amazing little mixer. It sounds great, and will do many, many cool things...as long as you know how. This is not a mixer for a casual user, and the learning curve is not gentle. If you're not already fairly comfortable with digital technology, and with standard sound reinforcement and mixing techniques, this may not be the best place to start learning. Having said that, if you're ready to step into digital mixing, this board is ready for you. It's a true pro-caliber console that gives up very little, and compromises even less. The preamps are clean, accurate, and have lots of headroom. The effects sound wonderful, and having advanced signal processing available practically anywhere in the signal chain is every bit as awesome as you'd expect. I've got the 16 channel ADAT card in the slot, giving me easy lightpipe connectivity to my 24-channel hard disk recorder. This adds huge capabilities, including training time on the console using live tracks I've recorded in the past, and the ability to let a band hear what they sounded like (minus the stage noise) after the gig.

I'm using my 01V with a pair of QSC K12s and Ksubs, and the combination is just unbeatable. I've rarely heard a system as clean and well-balanced, and I've had others with experienced ears say the same. Thanks to the 01V, no outboard gear is needed, making for an exceptionally compact setup without compromise.

Things to not like... As is common with companies who make hardware because they want to and software because they have to, the PC utility that comes with the 01V is sub-standard. It’s clunky, glitchy, barely gives a passing nod to Windows applications standards, and generally has an unfinished feel to it. Plenty of things I could talk about here. One glaring example: If you plug them in and boot them up in just the right sequence, hold your mouth just this way /><\ and sacrifice a goat to the binary gods, the 01V and the PC might notice each other and start talking. Maybe. C'mon, Yamaha; any time both machines are powered up and connected they should automagically ID each other and prepare to do business. Anything less is just embarrassing. I would easily put up with a tray applet if that’s what it would take to make this happen. Taken as a whole, the computer utility that comes with the 01V96 represents a huge missed opportunity for Yamaha. It could have been used to teach the console’s conventions, make up for its necessarily small display screen and layered interface, and mellow out the steep learning curve for those transitioning from analog mixers. A package which did all that would easily pay for itself in happy, productive customers. Instead, the utility's display is also (and unnecissarily) small, and it's interface is also layered--but not quite the same way the 01V's is, so instead of helping, it merely adds to the overall learning curve. Bottom line: it’s a bloody annoyance: Useful enough to keep using it (mostly because there’s no good alternative), but not nearly useful enough to forgive its legion of shortcomings. The combination of how bad this truly vital part of the package is, and how good it could have been was enough for my overall review of the 01V—which I’m otherwise pretty happy with—to lose one star.

Awesome!

I am very very happy with my new mixer! I used to work on the older O1V, and the 96 version is no comparison, much better sound, look and feel for that matter! matched with my Big Ben, the sound is excellent!

01V96 Shines in All Ways

I got the 01V96 some time ago, and it has been an amazing board. Great mic pres, great software (Studio Manager) and an easy to use interface make it an amazing buy.

I switched to this from the Tascam DM-24, and found the learning curve on the 01V96 to be much faster. The screens and controls make sense, and it's easier to scroll through what you need. Very clean, very user friendly, and the option cards work like a charm, and even without that, there are more i/o ports than a small studio needs to make it work for you. With two built in effect sends and returns featuring great effects from the Yamaha stable, and great EQ and dynamics, this is more like an 02R without the size, for real. Plus, you can cascade two with just a cord... it's built in.

The only things I miss in this board is on-board automation and a meter bridge - you have to use a MIDI sequencer to record automation, and it needs to be event-editable software if you want to edit your automations. However, I use Samplitude for recording, run MIDI out to a Mac running Performer 6, and can edit there. It sounds complex, but it works really well. There are mounting holes on the sides as if they might plan to have a meter bridge in the future, but so far, no option for that.

Overall, I can't say enough good things about this rack-mountable, easy-to-use (comparatively), reasonably priced unit. Kudos to Yamaha!