Overall, I really like the Zero4, though you wouldn't be able to tell with this post. Maybe my views will change over time, as I've only had it for about 3 weeks. I can get past the congested interface, I love the channel effects buses, I dig how the faders feel and appreciate the overall flexibility of the assignments, yadda yadda. I even like the output levels, apparently I've got good enough sound to compensate for whatever my ears are missing. So far, I haven't experienced the hissing.
However ...
My gripes are as follows, in order of severity:
Turning on/off the firewire connection with my medium spec pc (2 ghz 2 gb ram 600gb of sata2 drives raid 0 running Windows XP) resulted in severe unresponsiveness in Windows for a good 10 minutes. I need to make sure to boot up the mixer before my pc, or plan for a good ten minutes of down time. Hella annoying.
I play weekly shows. Last week, the channel that i routed to my right turntable experienced a volume-meter failure. The damn thing got stuck at 5 (out of 10), 15 minutes into my 2.5 hour set, until I rebooted. It's a good thing I was by myself -- I handled it by keeping an eye on other visual monitors. But what level of leniency would you allow your expensive mixer before you didn't consider it professional grade at all? What if I had guests? Needless to say, I've deterred purchases with this simple thought.
The instrument input is way too low. I need to figure out some kind of pre-amp setup for my electric guitar.
Why are the channel kill switches on the same lever as the effects enable switch?!? If you push too hard when you disable the effects on a channel, beware -- you might accidentally kill the signal on that channel!!
BPM Counter absolutely blows. By keeping an otherwise-steady-tap, you'll notice the BPM read +/- 13 BPM. That seems like a big friggin margin of error. I haven't seen BPM reading this poor since the first generation numark and gemini beat counters. Lame.
Audible pop when switching EQ schemes. Just pick one and stick with it.
And to top it all off -- documentation is non-existent. So don't go around thinkin you might be able to learn something from the manual. That ain't gonna happen. Thank god for Al Gore.
So there are my thoughts. I don't know that I'd recommend Zero4 to anyone, but it's fun for the mean time. Korg better get on some *helpful* firmware updates, otherwise I just don't see this line lasting very long. We've got a reasonably small scene (some of us don't have a "scene" locally), and word travels wicked fast.
Yup. Now I consume my fish sticks.
-Mars
