loving my yamaha M916 (changed)

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 3:36 pm

if anyone has used this board let me hear your thoughts. i know it lacks mutes but thats an easy fix. tranny's in and out. passive summing buss, same family as the pm1000. what else? does it have direct outs or inserts? # of auxes? will it need recapping?

what about the sound?

anything negative to say.

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 4:15 pm

this answered a lot of my tech questions

http://www2.yamaha.co.jp/manual/pdf/pa/ ... /M916E.pdf

still curious about opinions on the sound though? oh and service manual? i think i'm going to try to pick it up regardless.

update: i need to shut up and dig more. i just found this http://davelang.com/m916/ he has tons of stuff. thank you mr. lang.

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 5:37 pm

what a masturbatory thread : )

i'm picking it up tomorrow so i guess i'll decide for myself.

Snarky · Post by **Snarky** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 12:33 am

I own a yamadawg 1516, which is the same family. For the 150 bucks I spent, it was a steal. Completely modular, nice transformer tone, these things IMHO are a steal. I love it for guitars and basses, these pre amps can handle super loud program material great. The direct outs on my board are pre fader post eq, as they should be for getting into my DAW, but the only bummer is the clicky, staged, preamp pots. I can get there with mic placement, amp volume, and mic fandangalang, but I wish sometimes I didnt have to decide between SUPER HOT and not hot enough. I'm thinking about having either the preamp pots modded to make them smooth or just maybe making the direct outs post fader. But all in all, you shouldn't have to shell out big bucks for this thing, and you get a buttload of decent preamps for nothing. It's a no brainer as far as I see it. Sure I'd love to have (insert boutique $1000 a channel preamp here) but for 10 bucks a channel, I'll take it. Here's a pic for you.

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 1:25 am

i was worried that the trim might be stepped. if i can find a narrow panel mount pot and knob that will fit in the space it might be an easy mod to add a fine adjust. just add it in series after the trim. i'll check into it. but it might be touch if there isn't any space.

i also hope there is enough space to add a mute switch to each channel near the cue/solo. $10 and an hour of drilling. do you have anything to say about the pre's? can you compare them to anything?

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 7:06 pm

i just wanted to chime back in and say that i am very happy with the sound of this board. i spent a day cleaning, then a day wiring it up to my patchbay and finally getting some other things wired up that i?ve been putting off. now i've been listening to some program material through it that i know really well. and i couldn?t be happier with the results. this board is dead quite too. not a single scratchy pot so far and with all the channel faders maxed and the mains at nominal theres nothing. no noise at all. i expected some trouble but i guess it was just well taken care of. the high and low shelf are very nice and the mid eq is usable, but I don?t use eq much so this is fine with me. i don't like the limited gain staging with the trim only having 6 settings and some of the routing is annoying and limited as well, but appropriate for the time it was made, i guess. the buss called the ?matrix? is not the best idea in the world, you can?t assign individual channels to it, only the mains or the foldback/aux1 and an ?aux in? per buss which is actually kind of nice. the lack of mutes is lame but as i thought can be added to each channel very easily for about $.50 each and a little time. the solo is not "in place" which i don't like. but the stereo imaging is beautiful. also this board has a lot of gain at each stage so the slightest touch yields fairly significant results. i think this is a good thing but accurate recall will get a kind of tricky. i got used to a digital board for recall, but its well worth the sacrifice. a neat thing is that every channel and almost every output has inserts of a sort. except they are separate ins and outs. and they are all high impedance, so you don't need a reamp to feed a pedal or amp directly, but the neat thing is that because they is a separate out and in for each "insert" you just run an "out" and leave the "in" empty you can mult the output using them for anything from true direct outs (though they are unbalanced) to and extra send. add that to the mult on the patchbay and it opens up a lot of options. this is the same on EVERY channel and every out, including the mains and auxes. so this sort of makes up for the lack of auxes and other routing options. so far the only real problem i've had is a few VU bulbs are out. easy fix. to solo in a headphone mix you have to hit the channel buttons and then a cue assign button in the phones section. lame. i work very late at night sometimes like 3-6am so i work on headphones a lot. 95 pounds.

regardless of the limits (i do most of my signal processing in the computer so its all tolerable) the sound is what i was after and for what i paid for this thing i couldn't help but smile all day long.

steven

Snarky · Post by **Snarky** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 3:30 am

No mute buttons? Mine has on/off switches.
Isn't that the same thing? Does yours have a mix a & b xlr direct outs on each channel?

I love the sound of my 1516. The matrix is pretty rad for live applications (feeding multiple stereo sources all day long). Everything is balanced and quiet on my 1516. For the 150 i paid, its awesome. I'm gonna look into modding the stepped pots whether or not it is changing the pot or making my direct out post fader. They're good looking heavy sonsabitches. Oursmight be a little different but I know they're pretty close. Enjoy! Let me know what you would compare them too, because to me they just sound like a yamaha, like a PM 1000, or what have you.

jessejamietig · Post by **jessejamietig** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 7:59 am

I own one of these puppies, and I love it. I mainly use it as a summing mixer when I mix music. There's a Presonus Central Station hooked up to the main stereo mix, mainly acting as a master section which the M916 doesn't really have. Mix recalls haven't been much of a problem for me. I use the note fields liberally in ProTools. I know it's not accurate, but it hasn't failed me yet.

All in all I'm very happy with the board especially after only shelling out $150 for it. I got it at a video production house after they "upgraded" their audio room to a Mackie 1604. It's been well cared for it's whole life.

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 2:09 pm

the m916 has 2 XLR's in, with switches to swap between them and then a TS in and a TS out for the inserts. it doesn?t have any mutes at all, but it does have ?cue? switches, which are an early solo basically. but if you solo two things it will add the volumes together making them a lot louder then they really are in the mix. you can easily mod the cue buttons to work as mutes with a few minutes and some soldering, but i'd rather just drill some holes and add new switches to keep the cue?s intact. i might grow to like them.

modding the direct out to be post fader might be easy. there are a lot of different jumper setting you can change inside, so it might be really easy.

i don't know what to compare them to yet. i haven't used the pre's on mics and i haven't heard the pm1000.

the master section is very lacking. took a sec to get used to. something like the Central Station could be cool

this thing shits all over any 1604 i've ever used. maybe not for routing but definitely for sound

i paid $150 for mine too ( kind of odd ) and i got a brand new 30" 16 channel mogami snake with it, but it has cheap connecters ( already replaced the ?? with neutriks but not the xlr?s yet). thats worth about $150 by itself.

steven

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 2:32 pm

photo so you can see the difference between the two. like what are the switches below your foldback? you have 4 while i have 2, the FB pre-post and the m1/m2 for the xlr input selection. and are those your mutes under your trims?

Snarky · Post by **Snarky** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 10:50 pm

Lessee- the 1516 is modular too....

Mine goes
Buss
Pan
Eq
Echo 1&2
(pre or post)
Foldback 1&2
(pre or post)
cool huh?
Phantom on/off
Polarity reverse
Mix 1 or Mix 2 input (great for tape machine returns, really a 32 input desk,
but you can only listen to any 16 at once.)
Trim
Channel on/off (mutes)

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Thu Sep 28, 2006 12:17 am

yours has to be a step forward or two from mine. no phase reverse, phantom is one flush master switch on the back (lame), no buss assigns, no real busses, do have pre-post on all aux sends too, only six step's on the trim, no mutes, high and low shelf (low switchable 100-250hz) single sweepable mid but no Q, LPF switch at 80hz, you probably have a real master section too.

Snarky · Post by **Snarky** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 1:28 am

Yeah, mine is only a 4 buss, though. You make neat shirts, I want to buy a couple when I get the dough, you should make a 916 shirt, I would wear it with pride, my friend.

earl parameter · Post by **earl parameter** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 2:05 am

like a couple channel strips or something? thats a thought. people have been asking for more gear designs.

lang_dave · Post by **lang_dave** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 9:26 pm

Hey - I just finished recapping / modding one of these boards. I really like it. After I hacked around inside it, I a/b'd it against my Speck Xtramix and thought it sounded just as good.

Info on the recap / mod job here:

http://www.prodigy-pro.com/forum/viewto ... light=m916

Basically recapped with different values bypassed w/polyester film caps. Then I replaced / socketed the opamps in the EQ sections. The folks on the forum above told me what to do. I was just the soldering monkey.

I still want to change the direct outs so they aren't unbalanced, bypass the transformers on the way in for the two channels I use to monitor my ProTools recording setup and figure out a way to make the phantom switchable for each strip. The phantom problem is really priority #1. We'll see how that all goes.

I agree that these boards seem to be a great deal right now. Nobody wants them - no hype like the PM1000.

Note that the M1516 and M916 are very different beasts inside. The M1516 uses a discrete opamp Yamaha built called an NE80200, while the M916 relies mainly on a 9 pin SIP made by Toshiba called a TA7322P. The transformers on the channel strips are different as well.

Anyway, glad to see some other people are keeping these things out of the dumpster.

good luck with it,
dave

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loving my yamaha M916 (changed)

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