Just received the Alesis Multimix 16 Firewire today and had about an hour to set it up and play around with it. I guess this will be my "initial thoughts" review of it if anyone is interested....

In summary, it's a 16 ch mixer (8 mic pres, 4 stereo line) where each input is independently routed via firewire to a computer for recording. 2 ch monitoring from the computer via the 2 track return (summed with the 2 track input on the mixer). There's also built-in FX, but they use only 28-bit processing which may or may not be sufficient.

Here's my observations so far:

1. Setup was quick and flawless on my 4-year old WinXP box. I was recording 5 simult. tracks in Sonar 4 PE in roughly 20 minutes after opening the box (it comes with Cubase LE).

2. The knobs/buttons/etc seemed cheap and/or easily breakable, so it may not be for the heavy-handed. The color scheme doesn't help either since the bright colors make it look like a toy in my opinion.

3. Main mix and the Mute/Alt 3,4 bus have only 1 fader each even though they are stereo buses. Just something I wanted to point out (I knew this before buying).

4. I turned the gain on the mic channel to the 75% (2 o'clock) position and put the fader at +10 without out any input and my noise floor was about -80 db (digital) in Sonar (24-bit/44.1kHz recording format). This is much better than plugging a Behringer Eurorack into my sound card which has a noise floor of about -68 db and way better than the -40 db I get recording band practice into a cheapo laptop.

5. AD converters are the same as used in the Alesis HD24 recorder, so they can't be all bad.

6. Routing options for 2 track and the Mute/Alt 3,4 bus seem sufficient and intuitive.

7. I wish it had phase inverters on the mic channels (it doesn't), however it does have a 75Hz high pass filters for bass roll-off.

Here's some more thoughts on this device after using it for a bit now...

1. I had some trouble getting it to record without pops/clicks/etc, although
every channel was being recorded. For my setup the WDM drivers did not work properly at all. However, the ASIO drivers work fine after some tuning. I have
recorded 16 tracks simultaneous for 4 minutes without any pops/clicks/etc.

2. There has been some issues of the drivers not loading properly, but the device
has been recognized every time I plug it into the FW input. I'm contacting Alesis about this currently and it may be related to my setup specifically and not a general problem.

3. There is no gain settings for the 4 stereo line channels, but there is a PFL
for each one. Therefore you have to set the gain using the volume control on
whatever's coming in. Not handy at all...

4. The plastic knobs are starting to become somewhat annonying in there perceived fragility. I find myself concentrating on being gentle which is unnerving a bit. Very little confidence in them for sure.

5. The effects sound really good compared to some other devices I've used. The pitch shifter is much clearer and more natural than my PodXT live (which for the most part is unusable). Reverbs seem ok and could possibly be used for a live performance for added depth.

6. I wish it had inserts, even if only on the mains. I miss that. I suppose I could set up an effects loop using the Alt 3/4 bus and run it back into one of the stereo channels, but it wouldn't be the same.

I was thinking about buying a sound card but then saw this, what should I get? £400 is my budget. Is there a better product for the money out there?