Vendors don't usually just have PM5D's sitting stocked in their warehouses, nor is that the kind of thing that almost anyone ever buys via a website.
Find a local sound company or a dealer, and they can probably setup a demo for you for a number of consoles that fit your specs and they'll give much better pricing than you'll get from the list prices any website might show. Any vendor for sound equipment that deals in
Yamaha consoles like the LS9 and M7CL should be able to get their hands on a PM5D. Even those that don't appear from their website to sell sound consoles may be able to sell you one (or at least show you theirs or tell you who they would go to if they wanted to buy one).
Have you used a PM5D before? If you haven't, I wouldn't
drop a dime until you've personally gotten your hands on one for a demo -- that's a lot of money to spend and you wouldn't want to buy anything without first playing with one in person as well as some of the comparable consoles on the market.
Coincidentally, I was out
console shopping myself. We looked at the following consoles:
+
Yamaha M7CL-ES
+ Digico SD9
+ Allen & Heath iLive
+ Digidesign SC48
My personal favorite was the SD9. Digico isn't currently as top-of-the-line as Digidesign, but they're giving Digidesign a run for their money. The preamps in the Digico desks also sound better than in the Digidesign. That said, the SD9 costs a pretty penny at roughly $50k. I spoke to two different vendors yesterday that said they think Digico will be passing up Digidesign by the end of 2012 -- definitely take a look at what they have to offer.
The next runner up was the Digidesign SC48, which I believe lists around $28k but our vendor said he could sell it to us for $21k, which is just $1k more than the M7CL.
I'm leaving out the iLive because I didn't care for it at all. I was turned off by its user interface.
Currently we have two M7CL's, a half-dozen expansion cards, and a 56-channel hard-split
snake being quoted, but the SC48 is very tempting. What we like most about the SC48 is the addition of Protools, the better sounding preamps than the M7, and the ability to record up to an 18-channel mix into Protools, then
play it back later onto the
console (which is great for recording a mix one night and then using the playback however many months later to teach students how to mix a show without worrying that they'll mess up in front of an audience).
Still -- my favorite was the SD9, but since we're shopping for probably two consoles, it's a much harder sell for something that's marginally better than the SC48. I much preferred the user interface of the SD9 though -- I felt like I could learn that
console from scratch during a
sound check and not stumble trying to find anything. The facepanel of the SC48 wasn't my favorite -- it's much easier to get lost in it than the SD9, but after getting lost a couple times I think I could also pick that
console up during a
sound check. Then there's the M7, which any sound guy that's touched a
digital mixer before shouldn't have any problems operating.
Some basic questions for you:
1) What's the application?
Venue? Tour? (If a
venue, how big and what kind of shows? If touring, how big of tours?)
2) Who will be using the
console?
3) What's the average show that you would run on it?
4) What are the two most complex shows you would run on it in a year? (I say two each year because buying a
console so that once every decade you can fulfill a single
rider's needs is silly)
