Yamaha AW4416
A 44-channel digital mixer and 16-track hard disk recorder in one box — Yamaha's hardware was phenomenal, but the software made owners want to pull their hair out.
Overview
Yamaha aimed the AW4416 squarely at the project and home studio market, bundling its digital recording expertise into what amounted to a complete studio in a single chassis. At the heart of the machine sits a 44-channel digital mixer mated to a 16-channel hard disk recorder — sixteen mixer channels devoted to hard drive playback, with an additional 24 channels ready for live inputs and the final four appearing as two stereo effects returns. The recorder captures 16- or 24-bit uncompressed audio at 44.1 or 48 kHz, with one additional stereo track per song reserved for the final mix. A mastering mode makes it straightforward to burn stereo mixes to CD at 44.1 kHz.
The mixing section is where the AW4416 earns its keep. Four-band, 56-bit EQ is available on all 44 inputs, and Yamaha fitted a full dynamics processor — compressor, compander, noise gate, expander or ducker, all with flexible keying — to every channel but the two stereo effects returns. The stereo bus gets its own EQ and dynamics. Two internal effects processors cover ambiance, delay, pitch and special effects including amp simulators and rotary speaker emulations, and these can be pulled off the auxiliary send bus and dedicated to individual channel inserts. Add six additional aux sends tappable pre- or post-fader, eight main busses, a stereo bus and a cue bus, and there are 20 busses to route signals through. A full digital patchbay under the hood lets any channel signal be tapped and sent virtually anywhere in the recorder, or any of 50 different signals routed to the mixer's four analog outputs.
I/O is generous even before expansion. Analog inputs include combo XLR/TRS on Channels 1 and 2, TRS inputs on Channels 3 through 8, and an additional high-impedance input on Channel 8 for electric guitar or bass. Channels 1 and 2 offer phantom power and an analog insert point. Other jacks include headphone and monitor outputs (both with level controls), RCA stereo output, S/PDIF digital I/O, four unbalanced outs, a footswitch jack, MIDI in/out/thru, a dedicated MTC output, BNC-style word clock I/O, a To Host jack for computer connection and software updates, and a 9-pin jack for a PC-compatible mouse. Two expansion slots accept optional cards: ADAT lightpipe (eight channels in and out), TASCAM TDIF (eight I/Os), AES/EBU (eight I/Os), XLR analog (four in or four out) and TRS analog (eight in).
On the software side, the automation recorder is a direct descendant of the system found in the 02R mixer, allowing automation and editing of fader positions, pan, EQ and aux sends, plus recall of any of 96 scene memories per song. Automation data saves with each song. Sixteen sample pad buttons can be assigned digital audio clips (up to 90 seconds total), with a simple sequencer tracking pad presses and releases; pad outputs appear at the digital patchbay and can be routed to any mixer or recorder channel. Tempo and meter maps, a fully routable metronome, 99 markers per song, auto-punch, multilevel undo, fader and mute groups, automatic crossfade between regions, and user-controlled dither and bit-depth settings round out the feature set.
The physical controls earned praise. A bank of motorized faders does triple duty, controlling the first 16 mixer inputs, inputs 17 through 24, or the outputs of the hard disk recorder. Pro Audio Review (January 2001) noted the faders were smooth and quiet, apparently improved over those on the 01V, and that the buttons and controls overall had a high-quality feel. A data/jog/shuttle wheel is the main point of contact for changing parameter values or moving around a song, with an outer shuttle ring offering several high-speed transport modes plus 1/2X and 1/4X playback speeds. At speeds faster than 1X forward, and at all speeds in reverse, the unit plays brief blips of audio to help locate position; the 1/2X and 1/4X forward speeds play continuously but with transposed pitch. A nudge mode repeatedly plays a short clip before or after the current point for fine-tuning position with the inner jog wheel. Two displays — one fluorescent, one LCD — keep the user informed, the smaller fluorescent unit holding the main HD meters and counter while the large LCD handles most of the interface.
Storage centers on an internal 2.5-inch IDE drive up to 64 GB, mounted on a removable card so multiple drives can be purchased and swapped. An external SCSI jack on the back can be used only for backing up and restoring song data. Out front, the AW4416 hosts a CD-RW drive for mastering audio CDs, backing up and restoring songs, or importing CD tracks and WAV files.
And then there's the editing workflow, which is where the story sours. The AW4416 splits its track-editing mode from its track playback mode — the mode in which audio playback is heard is not the one used to make edits. The edit track view doesn't show track contents or even region borders; users see nothing but a solid black line indicating the presence of audio data. Since the audio waveform view is only available from playback mode, editing means working blind and deaf. Dropping precisely placed markers becomes the key to accurate editing, and the multistep process of finding edit points in playback mode, dropping markers, switching to track-edit mode, locating the markers and performing the edits struck Pro Audio Review (January 2001) as counterintuitive and inefficient. CD-RW operations were also slow: that review clocked a four-minute mono WAV file import at 14 minutes, with nearly as long to write a finished mix back to disc, and backing up a 280 MB song took nearly 20 minutes. The unit would import but not export WAV files — a serious problem for collaboration, though Yamaha said software Version 1.1, downloadable from its website, improved CD operation performance.
Sonics, by contrast, drew no complaints. The mixer's preamps are the same as those on the Yamaha 01V, which Pro Audio Review (January 2001) placed in the "very respectable" category for the price range. The 24-bit converters were judged to sound great, and the EQ uses the same algorithms as the 02R and 01V, with true high- and low-pass filtering especially appreciated. The two built-in effects units were called top-notch with a good variety of effects, and the dynamics processors controlled levels and noise without coloring the sound. On the bench, Total harmonic distortion was measured below 0.0025% from 20 Hz to 400 Hz and under 0.007% at 20 kHz at 44.1 kHz sampling, with linearity error held within +1.0/−0.0 dB from 0 to −130 dB FS. Signal-to-noise ratio measured 80.3 dB wideband A-weighted with input gains at maximum and an input signal just shy of A/D overload, and adjacent-channel separation exceeded 110 dB from 20 Hz to 1 kHz. Frequency response at 44.1 kHz ran +0.0/−0.1 dB from 20 Hz to 15.0 kHz, down 3.0 dB at 21.2 kHz.
Pricing put it firmly in professional territory: the AW4416 HD listed at $3,599, while the AW4416 CDHD at $3,799 included the CD-RW drive plus Sonic Foundry ACID, Sound Forge and Siren software. Mix (September 2001, p.142) field-tested a configuration at $3,799 with internal 13 GB and CD-RW drives, describing it as a digital workstation combining a very 02R-like, 8-bus architecture. Yamaha's own advertising billed it as all the studio needed to single-handedly record, mix and master a multiplatinum CD, promising no data compression across all 16 tracks at once — marketing copy, to be sure, but the underlying hardware backed much of it up.
The verdict from the period press was split down the middle between admiration and frustration. Pro Audio Review (January 2001) concluded the AW4416 was capable of more than competing in the high-end one-box-studio market — it had the potential to dominate it — but that the software was several paces behind the phenomenal hardware, especially in track editing. The same review noted that anyone without a decent grasp of signal routing and bussing might get lost inside the machine for a long time, but that those who understood the power would be rewarded with a recorder imposing virtually no limits on creativity. The bottom line, as that reviewer put it: not a toy — a beast. For collectors and project-studio users today, the AW4416 remains a fascinating artifact of the moment when Yamaha packed a console's worth of routing and a hard disk recorder into one chassis and then left the software to catch up.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.