Re:
Yamaha, most projects I do with
Yamaha QL/CL end up going QL with Tio's.
The Tio's and QL's are so much cheaper than the CL's and Rio's for not a seriously tangible difference. The major difference stepping up to the CL series is more knobs for the physical mix surface. Could be important to you if you are doing intensive mixing day-in/day-out.
Moving up to Rio's...is expensive. You can get 96kHz, but the QL/CL desks don't support 96k. You can get
AES/
EBU, if that's important to you. My understanding is that the mic pre's are in fact different between the Tio's and Rio's, but I've yet to hear anyone make a remark about being able to discern that difference.
I would say the vast majority of projects I see for theaters are either
Yamaha ($$) or Digico ($$$$$). If you go Digico, make sure you're looking at a -T version intended for theater or you'll become suicidal. That said --
Yamaha is more universally accessible. It's much easier to find people who can mix on
Yamaha than on Digico unless you're hiring top tier A1's.
In general, I would say you will be best served by something that has Dante.
Yamaha can do that natively, Digico needs a bridge. When I do
Qlab into
Yamaha's, I like to bring my multichannel mix in over Dante Virtual Soundcard. No external interface required.
Both
Yamaha and Digico have been good stewards to their customers in maintaining their consoles over time. Over the last 7-8 years,
Yamaha has released 5 major updates to the QL/CL series, each of which has had noteworthy feature releases like adding the Dugan automixers,
RTA's, control of
Shure ULX-D's and Axient directly from the mix surface,
etc. Similarly, Digico has done things like increase the number of channels a
desk can support that you could activate by paying a small fee to upgrade your mix engine. If you bought desks from them 6 years ago, rest assured you'll be able to mix them into the
ground. They're not likely to become functionally obsolete anytime soon unless your needs fundamentally change.