Perfect Sound and Sense

Our church has a limited budget and a limited amount of technical experience; this mixer solved both. The digital EQ and digital feedback suppression is perfect for us sound engineer wanna-be's. Yamaha should tout its one button YSP button more than it does; this single button adds "thump" to our small driver speakers. The manual not only gives the technical info, but gives a crash course in sound mixing. We are extremely satisfied with our purchase. The additional features will allow us to expand in the future; thanks Kurt Martin and thanks Yamaha.

Disappointing

I recently updated our Yamaha EMX5000 to this model. Very disappointing upgrade. Where to start? First off, you can't bypass the compressor. Even when the knob is 'off' you are still running through the compression circuitry. Probably not an issue with single mics and instruments, but if running a submix on any of those channels its very noticeable. Fix is to run the submix through channels 9-12. But wait, there are no L/Mono inputs. Only dedicated L and R channel inputs for the 1/4" inputs!!! Can't be Howie? No, its sad but true. Also gone are the pads for those channels, but thankfully they countered this penny-pinching improvement by padding the line level inputs by 26dB's.
Another nice nifty new feature is the digital equalizer. Works very well - if you turn it on. The lights light, the 'sliders' move so you assume it's opertational. No, you have to turn it on first. But, thank gawd, you can save your eq settings. What a useful feature?
Also gone are inputs jacks that go directly to the power amps. Now there is no way to run true bi-amp. I used to take the signal out through a crossover and then patch back into the left and right amplifiers for bi-amplification.
Lastly, the placement of the speaker jacks in the back are so high that you cannot rack mount this into a slant top rack case and get to the jacks. I had to use angled 1/4" speaker plugs. Forget about using the neutrik connectors in this situation.
No problems with the sound quality though - top notch Yamaha. But come on - compression? What pro who cares and utilizes compression would even think of using a powered mixer?