We had it for about a week long demo; ran
FOH, did monitors, and rumor has it we're buying one (don't quote me on that). We never did any recording, though we used ProTools as playback a few times when we didn't have any musicians on
hand. I found it very easy to use. The touch
screen makes life pretty simple when coupled with the control strip directly to its right. There's also a feature called touch and turn where you can grab any knob and use the one
encoder to control it if you're in a hurry. It wasn't working on our
desk at the time (we were running V1.0.5 software), neither was the surround panner.
I think it sounds pretty decent. Just a quick back and forth on our
system, I thought it sounded better than our PR40. Metering is very nice, and everything's color coded; aux's, matrix outs, control groups (which are your VCAs). One thing I have noticed is that the
VCA assignments don't follow the automation (important for
theatre). If they do, I haven't figured out how to recall assignments. And if it's important to you, the entire
console can be operated from the center bay of 12 faders. Any bank can be assigned to it.
My understanding is it comes standard with MADI to connect to the racks (you can connect two
stage racks, and you have 8 local ins and 8 local outs), though I recall you can get a fiber option to talk to the racks. The scribble strips show text as well. It's limited to around 10 characters I think. I can get most of what I need on one.
Patching effects is slightly unintuitive, you have to patch them in on the aux masters in the center section, rather than set up an effects rack elsewhere, even though there's an fx
tab on the master
screen. The internal effects sound pretty good, especially the SD verbs. Another fun toy is under the snapshot pane on the master
screen. There's a touch to fire mode where you touch the scene you want, an it'll fire that scene. Handy for rehearsals.
I'll see if we have one when I get back up to Chicago and let you know more. Also check out the offline editors on all the boards you're looking at. I know
Yamaha and DiGiCo have them up on their sites. I'm not sure about the other manufacturers you're looking at.