Yamaha DM3S first thoughts

[ajay_m]

Ok, this is gearfests fault. I thought I was immune to gadget lust but 15 minutes with the dm3 proved me wrong. And unfortunately pmt also had one in stock and,well, they're not far from kings cross.

Now yes it is expensive at £1499 and for some reason there's an even crazier RRP of £1880 BUT

It is a lovely piece of kit. Only 16 inches wide so it's a brilliant solution in a home studio with limited space. It weighs about 6.5kg making it very portable.

The hardware is top quality with a large capacitive touch screen with a bright, crisp display and the flying faders are precise and quiet. There's no audible fan noise.
The touch screen display has an area for scribble strips and is much higher quality than say the behringer mixers. You can focus on anything on the screen and then use the rotary encoder to precisely change a value as well as just sliding your finger around.

It can only sample at 48khz or 96khz (but of course at full 24 bit resolution so you can't unfortunately plug it into an mpc or force as these want the usb device to support 44.1khz

As an audio interface you have 18 ins and 18 outs. For most softsynths you can get latency down to 3 or 4ms. This means that it will be a pretty good no compromise audio interface as well as a full mixer. This is particularly so as all 16 physical ins are (afaik) fully trimmable from line to mic levels and have phantom power which as far as I can see is controllable at the individual channel level.

There's no specific provision for hi-z inputs and I'm not sure what the input impedance is, obviously channel gains are fully configurable but I haven't had much time yet to see what extremes of signal they can cope with.

Only 4 inputs have combo trs/XLR sockets which is a little annoying in a home studio where you probably had balanced TRS leads everywhere.

Yamaha provide a fairly useless paper manual and a detailed downloadable PDF which unfortunately is not terribly helpful, but then Yamaha have always been terrible with manuals. If you're not already familiar with modern digital mixers you're going to spend a fair chunk of time trying to get your head around how things route.

As a consequence I spent quite a while head scratching to route the computer usb out back to two channels and then further head scratching trying to find how to pan them left and right.

It can act as a control surface but I haven't explored this yet. It will probably integrate best with cubase given Yamaha's relationship with Steinberg but there is also a selectable option of 'other'. I will have a closer look at this soon. I think looking at the user assignable keys you'll be able to do the standard transport controls and I assume the faders will work in full duplex but I don't think the display scribble strip functionality will necessarily sync up with the daw, that would surprise me.

[Arpangel]

Are you using this for recording, primarily, I was interested and went and had a look at the manual, it seems a bit limited as a dedicated studio mixer, and it actually says in the manual that it’s purpose is live, PA work.
I can’t see any hardware aux outputs, or returns, on XLR/jack, or a control room section, what attracted me to it though, was its size, maybe the things I’ve mentioned are doable in different ways.

[ajay_m]

Well I'll be honest, I've always had a somewhat cobbled together setup which started as so many of us do with a small behringer mixer and ended up with a kmi kmix and a ka6mk2 somewhat awkwardly gluing things together.

You have 8 outs that can be assigned to virtually anything and a pile of busses so I can't immediately see why it won't work in a home studio setup, you can see from Yamaha's promotional material that they intend it for audio production as well as live sound.

I mean, sure, there's no talkback button as such etc but then most people don't work that way these days, you're in the same room generally with quiet enough gear not to compromise the recording.
It turns out that Yamaha have done a set of videos walking through functionality which is good as the manual is terrible but this morning, after waking up and thinking good god did I just spend £1500 on a mixer, I went upstairs and patched some analogue ins from the force and the hydrasynth ( waiting on some xlrs from Amazon so I can rewire other 1/4 inch balanced io to XLR so I only have 4 ins on the combo plugs currently).

And this was a complete revelation. For the first time there's no noise floor. I can turn things up to truly deafening levels and.... When I stop playing.... Silence. The preamps are absolutely stellar and the analogue gain adjustment levels look huge, will plug in a mic in a minute and explore that too.
You also have quite separate digital gain which could be useful dealing with different audio level standards from different sources.
I'm starting to figure it out too. You need to assign the three primary screens to the home button so it cycles between them. For some reason it's not configured that way out of the box. Then it's much much more intuitive to use.

So if you think about the cost of 16 high quality preamps, a good 18:18 audio interface with decent latency thatll handle 96khz/24 bits on all channels, a control surface with flying faders and a 9 inch touchscreen, that £1500 starts to feel a lot more reasonable.
Oh, and you can plug a thumb drive into the front and record directly onto it. That's a marvellous idea in the studio, just set it recording and any moments of inspiration are captured.

If you can get down to the tileyard today you could have a hands on session with it. Don't know how big a journey that is for you though.

[Hugh Robjohns]

I can’t see any hardware aux outputs...

It uses Yamaha's standard arrangement of 25+ years, with OMNI outputs which are configurable to carry any output source. The DM3 has 8 Omni outs, with two notionally pre-assigned as main left/right outputs. That leaves 6 for other purposes. It seems the mixer has 6 submix buses, 2 FX buses and 2 matrix buses.

...or returns, on XLR/jack

It has 16 physical analogue inputs. Use them for whatever purpose you need, mics, instruments, fx returns etc. If you need more I/O you can add external Dante boxes from Yamaha or various third party manufacturers including Focusrite.

[Wonks]

From the price, I guess this is the DM3S (or ‘DM3 Standard’) model, rather than the Dante equipped DM3 version, which is around £500 more?

If ajay_m confirms this, could a mod change the review title to avoid confusion? Hugh’s already mentioned Dante expansion modules, which aren’t applicable to the DM3S.

[Hugh Robjohns]

Ah.. I assumed the Dante option was a retrofittable module, like in the TF series (and other Yamaha desks). It seems not... which is s shame.

[henryfish]

Thanks for sharing your experience with this unit so far.

Are the faders touch sensitive?

Yamaha are marketing this unit as having DAW control capability however if the faders are not touch sensitive as well as being motorised it's not possible to do any spontaneous editing over pre-written automation (i.e. in auto touch write mode in Logic)

[ajay_m]

This is the DM3S. Yes, you have to choose if you want Dante, it's not retrofittable.

I just have a home studio. This is a rather extravagant present from me to me for having my life saved recently by an observant GP. Long story short, I had prostate cancer. After surgery was successful, I thought, damn it, life's short, I love the joy of making music and at gearfest I had the chance to play with the dm3 and, well. Here we are.

The faders are not touch sensitive. However the daw control surface mode appears to offer automation functionality BUT even more interestingly there's a pdf outlining extensive OSC support which appears to allow almost any aspect of the device to be computer controlled including the scribble strips.
Now I have a fair bit of experience writing control surface plugins (bcr2000 for sonar and reaper years ago) and the kmi kmix so I will definitely look into this. It'll be reaper if I do anything.

I will reiterate that Yamaha's manual plumbs new depths of awfulness and may well be the worst user manual I have ever grappled with, for a pretty complex product and while I have a fair bit of experience from years ago with analogue desks, this, apart from the kmix, is my first digital desk.

The kmix actually has a fair bit of depth to it but in comparison its user manual is a model of clarity. What Yamaha do is just page after page of (and I'm parodying here) "LRF1194 button. Press to enable LRf1194 mode".
So nothing is explained, if you don't know your matrixes from your busses don't look for any help here. All you have is some teeth-grindingly annoying videos from Yamaha to back up the manual. If you're coming from other Yamaha mixers like the TF series then the UI and flow will be similar. But if, like me, that's not the case then it's more of a challenge. In fact I'm amused that right now using ms flight Sim I know the Airbus A320 internal systems (and can do a cold start) better than I understand the DM3).

But I understand the X32 manual was pretty horrible too. I write a lot of technical documentation as part of my day job so once I have my head round this thing you may get "dm3 the missing manual" in due course.

All this is redeemed by the sheer quality of the hardware. Dead quiet preamps with a huge gain range (although a ribbon mic might be pushing it). And the audio interface seems to run stably in reaper at 128 byte buffering reporting 3.6ms and using my torture test of the four Embertone strings playing in unison (this'll reduce anything inadequate to abject crackling very quickly).

Anyway, it's early days. If you didn't get to gearfest I think PMT planned to set one up in their store. They were protective over the one unit they had and wouldn't even unbox it for me. So I just whipped out the credit card and bought it, which rather flummoxed the salesperson. Guess I didn't look like a real buyer, eh....

[ajay_m]

Right, well much recabling later we are getting there. Dear Yamaha. You position this device at home studio users as well as for live sound. The person who decided you could save 0.05 cents on the bill of materials by only making 4 inputs have combi TRS/XLR jacks is an idiot.
Ah well.
Now the actual internal routing is very flexible so I have a main channel assignment currently taking stereo pairs from the hydrasynth, fs1r and all four outs from the akai force, plus daw main l and r with the main stereo faders linked so they move together.
Then mix1/2 is a stereo bus feed of all of these so that I can have the main studio monitors on but switch to mix1 and just have the phones active, to stop annoying the neighbours. Or to have the phones nice and loud but the monitors much quieter if I prefer.
The customisable keys allow me to switch monitoring from main to mix1 quickly without using the touchscreen. I also like that the digital gain feature lets me wind back the daw outputs which are a bit hot compared to the analogue ins.
Then I have Omni 5 and 6 set to feed mix1/2 back to the Force inputs 1 and 2. But I will probably reconfigure that to be a separate mix3/4 bus for flexibility.
This still leaves me with a pair of spare busses and I haven't used either matrix yet and I have 8 analogue ins still free. And four outs free as well.
Haven't explored the daw control surface functionality yet but this is looking good so far, the ergonomics compared to my previous setup are infinitely superior.
I get you could do this previously with a bunch of digital mixers but the dm3 fits neatly into a limited space and if I were still doing live gigs, with a small band at 6.5kg you can tote it anywhere.

[Hugh Robjohns]

It sounds good.

Yamaha have long favoured XLRs for I/O over TRS. The DM1000 I have is all XLR...

[Arpangel]

This is all a bit complicated, how do you handle control room monitoring with this? On my analogue desk I have 10 mono channels, 4 stereo, 6 aux sends, which are all used up, I return the effects on the stereo inputs, there are 4 groups and a master for feeding my DAW, I have a control room monitor section, and a talkback, every inout is used up.
Could this situation be copied on the DM3, with more to spare? And exactly how can it be expanded.

Thanks.

[Hugh Robjohns]

Nope... you'd need a more capable desk.

I could replicate your setup on my ancient DM1000, with two aux buses unused, thirty spare inputs, four spare groups, two spare assignable analogue outputs, and 32 assignable analogue/digital outputs (depending on installed interface cards). All within a 19-rack space.

There are more modern digital desks just as capable, if not more so...

[ajay_m]

Yes, I totally agree. I don't think this little desk is going to work for those kind of scenarios. But then I don't have a control room, just quite a lot of 'out of the box' synths and stuff that I have accreted over time. I work with computers all day so picking up a mouse to make music somehow just doesn't do it for me. I just love lots of flashing lights and buttons to press, it's like being on the bridge of the Enterprise. Plus to be honest quickly scrolling through a bunch of sounds on the Force (or my Roland Sonic Cell) is infinitely quicker than faffing around with the truly awful UI in Kontakt, for example.

So in this setup I effectively want a main mix that just allows anything plugged into the desk to be heard through headphones and (if turned on) the monitors and then one or more mixes that allow me (a) to hear whatever's on that mix buss through the phones but not through the monitors and (b) to potentially route the output of that buss out to a piece of hardware that has inputs as well as outputs (like the Akai Force, or in the case of the Hydrasynth, it can accept external audio feeds as inputs to its 'mutators' for example).

I don't have external effects/compressors/eq etc. to worry about either.

On the MIDI side I have an old Ensoniq KMX-8 8:8 MIDI switch which is a godsend as it lets you just press two buttons to connect anything to anything, and now I have the audio equivalent via the DM3S. It also has the advantage that the scribble strips now at last let me see what the heck I'm controlling (and I think you can also rename the actual mix busses as well, which could be handy as I could call one 'ToForce' or whatever to remind me what it's gonna do).

Gotta remember this thing fits in 16 inches of desk space, which is about all I have free (there's a rather large 3D printer sitting to the left of it, this isn't just a studio, it's a mad scientist's lab with an electronics workbench and 3d printers as well).

Next step is to start looking at DAW integration. Without wanting to sound conflicted I still do need to interact with the DAW and I had the KMI K-Mix running as a quite serviceable control surface with Reaper (full duplex fader control, mute, solo, record arm, bank switch, focus on up to 8 plugins by pressing a button, control of plugin params, meter bridge, transport control + scrub). I may now reposition that to be easier to reach. I will be looking at the DM3's capabilities as a control surface mind you, it appears to have extensive OSC support but I have not yet investigated this. Of course the lack of a transport position display would be an issue (but I could easily build a little box with one of the marvellous little Pico Pi's in there and some 14 segment displays I have, to remote that out from Reaper).

I've also got to work around the limitation of no Hi-Z inputs so things like guitars aren't just gonna plug in to the desk (again, I think Yamaha missed a trick here, if they had made this an option on the four ins with combo jacks this would have been handy. They seem to feel this mixer is appropriate for more than just live sound in their promotional material). My KA6MK2 of course does have this capability so I could press that into service if necessary.

An annoyance, by the way, is that although the user configurable keys on the DM3 allow you to toggle monitor inputs, so you could listen to any buss just by pressing the appropriate key, you CAN'T switch to 'sends on fader' views through the configurable keys. You have to use the touchscreen. This is rather exasperating, possibly Yamaha will fix this in a future firmware update.

PS: Hugh, does anyone by any chance make an inline widget that runs off phantom power and accepts a Hi-Z input?. That would be a neat little solution for this scenario.

[Hugh Robjohns]

PS: Hugh, does anyone by any chance make an inline widget that runs off phantom power and accepts a Hi-Z input?. That would be a neat little solution for this scenario.

Yes. It's called an active DI box and lots of people make them in single, dual, and occasionally multiple channels. Orchid Electronics have excellent and affordable solutions for your requirements, like the micro-DI.

[ajay_m]

Thanks Hugh, looks like the perfect solution at around 40 quid as far as I could see.

[Hugh Robjohns]

£30 plus shipping I think:

https://www.showbitz.co.uk/product/orch ... -micro-di/

or the dual-channel one at £60:

https://www.showbitz.co.uk/product/orch ... ro-di-box/

My review:

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/or ... s-di-boxes

These Micro-DI boxes are great for home recording use because you're not paying for gig-worthy steel cases, battery slots, link-outputs, transformers, or any other unneeded fripparies. Instrument in one end, mic level out the other, runs on phantom, clean and trouble-free. Job done.

[Arpangel]

All within a 19-rack space.

There are more modern digital desks just as capable, if not more so...

Care to name a couple Hugh? just as an example.
As you know, I haven’t found anything yet to fit that particular bill.

[ajay_m]

Of course you *can* expand the Dante-equipped version of the DM3 with the Tio1608-D I/O rack though at nearly £1,300 for that plus £2,000 for the Dante-equipped mixer. [I *think* - but don't quote me - you can add two of these in total].

I'm not quite sure how you control all those ins from the desk. There are just the two fader banks but you do also have two 'custom views' so I *surmise* you could put the remaining ins on those. (as all the Dante I/O appears in the routing list, but of course disabled on my non-Dante unit).

Although of course a lot of the larger desks, while they have quite large I/O counts, don't necessarily have all those analogue I/O channels, they're relying on digital expansion as well. It sounds like you want a LOT of actual physical analogue I/O. For example the A&H SQ5 has a ton of I/O but only 16 analogue ins which is the same as the DM3.

Of course Yamaha do a bigger brother (or sister) to the DM3, the DM7 compact, but the price is definitely going to make you gasp. And you only have 16 ins still. (albeit 16 outs, I believe). Makes the DM3 + Dante + I/O rack option look quite cheap!.

So, yeah, that is an interesting question. Given Arpangel's requirements, which I take as 'fits in a 19 inch rack (width I assume, not height constrained) and has (I don't know exactly, Arpangel, 16 analogue outs and analogue 24 ins? would that meet your requirements), what should he purchase?. It *does* sound like an expanded Dante DM3 might work but whether the lack of faders would be a deal-breaker I don't know.

[Hugh Robjohns]

Care to name a couple Hugh? just as an example.

I'm sure you can use Google. All the big names have something to offer. I'm not going to spend an hour researching models just for you to reject them all out of hand again. Been there, done that...

[sonics]

StudioLive 32SC, A&H Qu-16 or SQ-5 for starters...

[ajay_m]

Interesting though. I had been looking at digital mixers for a while but for me they were all too large physically or too small as I needed more than 8 ins (stereo synths obviously chew up a surprising number of channels)
But googling while you quickly get "the model xuz123 supports 128 ins and outs" you have to do a fair bit of digging to find out how many actual analogue ins and outs you get without adding expansion boxes.
I can feel a good SOS article coming on here, where the team walk us through some of the options focussing on use cases like home studio, proper recording studio (ie control room etc), band doing their own gigs, live sound etc.
Because I know a lot of this stuff is quite bewildering. I'm an IT professional by trade with music as a hobby, and I confess it's taken several days to start getting my head around the dm3 and it's just a baby wee thing to you folks!

[Arpangel]

StudioLive 32SC, A&H Qu-16 or SQ-5 for starters...

Sorry, I have no option but to reject those out of hand.

[ajay_m]

Ok, after an exhausting week at the coalface I get some time to play around, so time to explore the DM3 DAW integration.
Now the 'documentation' is rather sparse but then I've already discussed this so not gonna gripe again. You can choose 'Steinberg' or 'Others' as the protocol.
I can't immediately see a behavioural change here between the two options but I connected via Reaper and set DM3-2 MIDI in and out (DM3-1 is an entirely separate MIDI interface for controlling the actual desk via MIDI - you can change scenes and automate various other things (this is quite extensively configurable from the mixer UI).

When you then press custom keys 1 and 2 together you go into DAW control mode. Pressing any other fader bank keys or just one of those custom keys will take you out of it.

In DAW control mode the UI shows quite a lot of stuff; automation modes (read,touch, latch etc) a timecode panel, a full set of transport controls and buttons for scrub and shuttle, as well as bank and channel change. Obviously these all do nothing at the present (except send MIDI events) because I have no control surface plugin installed yet.

The 8 main faders all send MIDI events (CC) as do the SEL, CUE and ON buttons (for a button down and up event separately) and each user-defined key also sends a MIDI event, as does the rotary encoder.
(when turned, but for some reason not when pressed).

The scribble strip area shows DAW1-8 so clearly with an appropriate control surface plugin, those will change to reflect the currently selected channels.

The master fader and buttons do not send events but that I think is because they are still controlling the desk in this mode, which makes perfect sense.

Recording a series of fader movements and then playing back the MIDI, the faders all danced around, so it clearly works full-duplex.

However playing back a series of button presses didn't change the lights - but this doesn't happen on the desk either, it's likely that there are other MIDI messages to do this. (which is good, because it makes it much easier to write control surface plugin code, I had a right old job with the KMIX because the LEDs still toggled in control surface mode when the buttons were pressed).

Here's some raw midi with timestamps from wiggling fader 1

+3097 3097: B0 00 1D
+1 3098: B0 20 00
+116 3214: B0 00 1A
+4 3218: B0 20 00
+94 3312: B0 00 14
+1 3313: B0 20 20
+138 3451: B0 00 14
+2 3453: B0 20 60
+113 3566: B0 00 1A
+6 3572: B0 20 40
+108 3680: B0 00 1E
+0 3680: B0 20 40
+101 3781: B0 00 25
+1 3782: B0 20 40

I now need to identity what exactly the protocol(s) are, but at least initially this looks very promising - and there is, apparently, also extensive OSC support which is documented.

This has the potential to be an excellent DAW controller although I have no idea if it can act as a DAW meter bridge and of course the faders aren't touch-sensitive. However, software is my day job and I already have two Reaper control surface projects that worked well, so the challenge now is to figure out what the 'Steinberg' and 'Others' protocols are actually expecting. There may even be a suitable control surface plugin - also, you do get a license for Cubase AI thrown in, so I could install this and presumably get the DM3 working as a controller and then snoop on the MIDI traffic if necessary.

I'll keep you posted but this does look quite impressive so far. Yamaha clearly put a LOT of thought into DAW integration by the looks of things.

PS: The Roland Sonic Cell (which is both a convenient source of quickly available sounds and a Hi-Z guitar interface) I have is a little noisy compared to the other synths. I think (though Roland's documention isn't clear) that the outputs are unbalanced). But no problem. Just turn on DYN1, set the threshold to -72 and put a bit of decay on there and you have a nice noise gate. Having this sort of capability on every channel via an intuitive touch UI on a screen around the size of an iPad mini is just marvellous. I'm really falling in love with this mixer, it's a pity Yamaha's documentation and support materials are a bit patchy right now, but in fairness, it's a new product, gotta give them time.

[ajay_m]

Ok,well this is encouraging. Selecting Reaper's built-in HUI (partial) control surface actually works reasonably well.

The transport controls work with the exception of loop both from the UI and from the custom buttons and also I can't seem to get 'rewind to start' to work.
Both the UI and the custom buttons reflect the transport status in full-duplex
The faders work in full duplex
The scribble strips show the first four characters of each track name
The bank and channel switches appear to work and the scribble strips update correctly.
Cue controls solo and channel ON controls mute (and the lights work full duplex)
Pressing the scribble strip icon toggles record arm and shows the current status of record arm in full duplex
SEL toggles track select. If you select multiple tracks, the focus rectangle appears around them and the faders act together.
The automation controls, scrub and shuttle buttons and the timecode I don't think are currently operational.

There is an apparently much more capable plugin created by a Reaper user (Klinke) which I will try next. This is pretty great though, already.

[Drew Stephenson]

I'd heartily recommend the Klinke extension. And for anything that doesn't do, check out ReaLearn (donationware) by Helgoboss.