korg zero 8/4

[armada]

who has one of these mixers? i just came across these recently, and have a serious gear crush on it. any opinions about these?

[hxdb]

I've got a zero 8...I must say it's an extremely useful piece of kit in the scope of electronic music.

It doesn't come without it's downfalls though...

I'll outline what I feel are the pros and cons of it.

Pros:
-Very flexible device, capable of accomplishing many tasks in 1 single unit.
-Superb effects section, with a great variety of different effects, albeit a touch laggy in it's control.
-Plenty of inputs, and my favorite is that each channel on the mixer has both 1/4" and RCA inputs.
-Can easily be used as a DJ mixer with the crossfader and cue functionality.

Cons:
-Metering your channels SUCKS! Since the channels are labeled in a linear format (0 - 10) instead of in dB, there is no sense to it. Plus the LEDS used in the channels are a terrible color and they bleed into each other so you have to be directly over the mixer to properly meter.
-While extremely handy, the firewire interface is NOT a high quality sound card, the converters are decent, but once you start loading up lots of VSTs the latency required to avoid buffer underruns is awful. Clearly there aren't any DSPs being used on the interface.
-No ADAT (I know, I'd be dreaming to pay what I did and get this whole package with ADAT, but COME ON...I can dream can't I?)

Anyways, I really like how this unit has changed my workflow, and it was a needed upgrade for me. But if you have serious requirements from this unit and are going to be relying on it for a sound interface and a mixer, it may come up short for you.

I'm happy with my purchase, but there's certainly room for improvement with this device.

Hope this helps you.

[armada]

thanks for the reply! for my uses i see myself running maybe 3-4 channels of vst's in Live thru on each channel and maybe a guitar or two and two turntables on the rest of the channels. do you think this would be pushing its processing?

do you use this with a computer simultaneously? how do you think it would work for mixing down a small live band?

thanks again!

[oliviaharis]

I found Zero-G's Phaedra plugin, and it seemed like just the ticket to get a taste of analog without spending $2G on a new Dave Smith Prophet 08. It's not a virtual analog in the sense of Minimonsta or the Access Virus, etc.
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oliviaharis
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[billy the robot]

Take a look what Ed Solo & Co. do with the Zero 8, pretty wicked.

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you old schoolers will recognize the remix...

[billy the robot]

...well that didn't work haha... copy and paste this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JRKxlpDZ2E

[billy the robot]

..or just click on the link...

[hxdb]

thanks for the reply! for my uses i see myself running maybe 3-4 channels of vst's in Live thru on each channel and maybe a guitar or two and two turntables on the rest of the channels. do you think this would be pushing its processing?

do you use this with a computer simultaneously? how do you think it would work for mixing down a small live band?

thanks again!

From what you mentioned it SHOULD be fine. Hopefully you don't need to use a midi controller, because that's where I find my biggest problems come in to play...with the latency.

But yeah, this should adequately suit your needs.

Good luck!