Thanks for the great replies.

You folks certainly have rebalanced my thinking which is great. Wasn't aware of Realband and that it was a DAW. Given BIAB is still on it way here it is probably worth holding of on the Yamaha until I can fire up Realband and have a look.

Currently only have a laptop but it is an i5, has 2gig RAM and a 500Mb HDD. It only has a basic 3.5mm mic and earphone audio I/O. So no expadability options of perhaps swapping out a sound card.

Just liked the flexibility of the Yamaha to run in some balanced microphones, guitars acoustic and electric) and other sources. Probably a bit of old school on the audio front. Like to have some monitoring and some conrtrol over EQ, compression, padding, phantom powering etc etc thought this might in part compensate for limited laptop I/O. Also do like buttons and direct control.

The Focusrite looks a nice compact mixer. It may well be that once I get into it this will be adequate. I have always been an over engineering kinda guy. The extra hundred or so dollars to get a MG10XU or MG12XU is not too much of an issue. I have some other audio playout sources that would be nice to run into the mixer for just listening to music with some decent monitor speakers. It is in a man cave after all.

What you have opened my eye and thought process to is would I need the XU version mixer? That is USB I/O? They do a version without and no Cubase A1. If Realband does the business then Cubase is not needed and could get just the basic mixer version.

Will look into Reaper and Soanar DAWs as well, man there is a plethora of them out there.

Ideally was looking to get clear in my mind a definite way to go as I am off to the US next week catching up with some friend ps there. The range and the amazing prices always presents an opportunity to bring some bits back. Unfortunately the timing might not be that great given BIAB won't arrive here until after I have left.

Was hoping that there was going to be a clear cut way to stitch a system together but way too many options and ways to do it.

Haven't ruled out the possibility of building up an AV PC as I might look to do some video editing possibly using Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve software. Which is another reason I am thinking a 10/12 mixer. Resolve software on its own is a possible DAW solution. Never one to do things by halves.

We live in exciting times. Imagine firstly trying to do what we can achieve today with great tools like BIAB and all the amazing low cost editing tools. 25 years ago you would have had to sell your house to afford to do what we have now that probably cost around a $1000 or so dollars to do.

Crazy nuts what this can do for $299...there is even a free version that does an amazing amount. www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

Thanks again for all the great replies very much appreciated.

Regards,

Ian

Last edited by Fleetz; 05/06/17 04:40 AM.