Jason Tratta

We’ve had some time at The Alley Theatre to get to know in the in’s and out’s of our new Yamaha M7CL Digital Console. First, let me just say that I really enjoy working on this thing. It has some problems, so if it seems like I spend too much time talking about the bad points it’s only because I would love to see these issues fixed.

Inputs/Outputs
I have been working with the 48 input variety since October. That’s a lot of inputs! However, some of the shows we have been running come very close to maxing them out. I can see how working on a musical could become very crowded, all in all, I love all these beautiful inputs. We also have the MY16AT expansion card the gives us and additional 16 channels of digital audio. Our SFX computer connects directly to the console this way. Remember though…there is no gain on most digital inputs…digital 0 is digital 0…fix your sound files if you need more oomf!

The output section is pretty funky. 16 Mix buses, 8 Matrix Channels, and the LCR Buses. Here’s what’s funky, there is no real difference between any of them except the labels. Assigning an input to a output is exactly the same process for each output section. There are no hard assigns, you assign input channels via rotary knobs (virtual of course) to the desired output level. Your basically working with a giant 24 channel matrix if you want…which I think is pretty great.

Here’s a warning if your thinking about buying additional output expansions: You don’t get anymore virtual sends in the console. Which means you will not have the option to treat newly installed outputs as a new Mix. This is something I wish Yamaha would add to the software. For now, you can either assign these outputs to a mix bus, there by losing the original output or, you can use these expansion slots as direct outs. Which would be great if we needed a monitor console.

More on the M7 coming soon…