OK, so I told myself I'd give myself one hour for the first round. I tried to look at the TT24 with a completely open mind. Having read parts of the manual, as well as some reviews, I must admit I had some "I wish it'd do THIS" thoughts. Most of my wishes could be easily summed up like this: be more like the Yamaha 01V I am used to. Those who know me will agree than I tend to do things "my way". I am something of of a control freak, but not in a "my way or the highway" sort of way. At least in my mind, it is more from a "once I figure out how to do things, if I do it this way all the time, I have less to think about, fewer chances to screw up, etc". What does this have to do with the TT24?? Well, nothing and everyting. I am used to the 01V and 01V96, so anything different is, by default, wrong, right? So I thought...
So I finally have some time to play with the desk this morning. I get to the shop, carefully open the shipping box so I can put the cased mixer back into it when Mark has me send it to the next Road Tester, slide the case out, pop it on a truck, and open it up. Initial thoughts, based on the look of the desk, are that is is quite a bit more "serious" looking than the 01Vs. Upon powering it up, I sit down for a "just walked up" session. I tried to look at this as a first timer, but my other digidesk experience probably gave me a slight advantage over a true virgin. I figured out most of the features pretty quick. Reset all the flexgroups to VCAs, set the EQ control to "slow" so I had finer control. Some reviews have said the EQ points change in increments that are too large. This is only true of you've got the machine set up to do so. I prefer finer control, and will gladly have to spin the knob more to get where I want. I set the digital end to 96K, and found it a bit more open/airy sounding than when set to 48K. Assigning channels to VCAs was super easy.
Things I thought I'd prefer the yamaha way, but didn't, were mostly the lack of a user defined page. On my 01V96, my user layer has the 8 VCA masters, two vocal FX returns, and six vocal channels. On the TT24, the 24 faders are always either channels 1-24, 25-48, returns, or masters. At first read, that bothered me. The fact that there are four group faders to the right of the 24 channel faders means I can park my "actual mix" VCA masters there, and still have access to whatever channels I need. The way I set up the VCAs to accomplish this was simple: 1= drums, 2= bass, 3= gtrs, 4= keys, 5= all instruments, 6= backing vox, 7= lead vox, 8= vox fx. Now, with the flexgroups on 5-8, I have band-minus vocals, backing vox, elvis, fx, all on separate VCA masters. When it comes time for the bass solo, I can either bump up the two bass ch faders, or switch the flexgroups to 1-4 and bump up #2. More on actual desk usage later.
The preamps sound fine. The EQ works well. The 6 band output EQ is cool. It has two parametrics, two shelving, and two notch filters. The one thing I could not figure out in my first hour was how to get to the "matrix routing" page. I'd like to know if you can route aux masters to the matrix. If not, the only way to get an aux master out is on a TRS, which works too. I'd prefer an XLR right on the desk. I am confident I can do any event with this desk, using no outboard anything, and not miss a thing. This includes outboard EQ for the monitors, fwiw. My mon racks are DSP driven and tuned pretty well already, so I don't need a ton of EQ to get the mons hot and stable.
More later. If anyone has any "what happens if you do THIS" questions, post them and I'll try them and post the answers.