What more can be said? If you want a 16 line/mic plus 16 line channel mixer with 4 simultaneous sends and 4 busses with extra sauce, this is your board. Live use or recording, this thing rocks. Just take care of it and it'll make you sound good.

Sound
For what it's selling for now, sound should be 11! It sounds stellar with lots of headroom. Flexible input channels, and the extra 16 line inputs are very handy. Responsive, useful level LEDs on the 16 mic/line channels, and silky smooth 100mm faders. Very clear mix buss and quiet, more than good enough for digital recording. Clean mic pre's. The preset effects are very useful, and the reverbs are surprisingly lush. It has features of serious recording consoles like EQ defeat switches for the least electronics involved in your signal for the cleanest possible sound. I might dog a bit on the EQ. I don't care for it, but I'm spoiled by access to some marvelous British studio desks and my Allen&Heath. However you aren't buying a Neve or SSL, and the 4 band EQ is very flexible and sounds decent. If you record properly, you shouldn't ever have to engage the EQ circuit anyway.

Features
They loaded this thing up with extras. Just look at the detailed image and you'll see everything that big studio recording consoles have. But then this is based on their M9000 console with the same EQ and electronics.

Quality
I bought mine back in 2000 for twice… read more as much, and it's been my understanding that since then the manufacturing has been entirely moved to China, so I may have a better quality board. But it's also been my experience that the problems today are overall still few in number, and quality is very good. How many thousands of these things are in use?

Value
I paid $980 for mine, and it was a bargain then!

Manufacturer Support
Never had a problem.

The Wow Factor
I have it, and still admire the thing. The silver case and layout is simply gorgeous.

Musical Background:
hobby/semi-pro

Musical Style:
progressive rock, Brit grunge read less