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(Ed. Note: We took a bit of a different approach on this one. Having fronted a horn band for more than 20 years, I am well-aware of the difficulty of making a good horn sound right in the system with the mics generally available on your typical house gig. It is why I carry my own horn mics on every gig where I am doing the muso thing. So, for this review, we put the mic in the hands of a top-notch sax player who knows his way around a console and then got some feedback from the sound guys on some of the gigs where he used it. Here is what they had to say.)

I first had a look at the IM8 at the 2008 winter NAMM show. John Schauer from Yamaha led me to the secret room where the not-yet-released board was waiting. Yamaha is not the only manufacturer that likes to keep their new products undercover until the moment of release. Just about every mixing console manufacturer conceals their new hardware until they are ready. Whatever the reasoning behind Yamaha's motives, John was definitely in secret-agent mode at NAMM. He told me that this console was designed with houses of worship in mind. It has enough bells and whistles to satisfy a variety of mixing demands and is still very simple to operate. However, as I looked over the board, I thought it would work well in an array of operations outside of worship.

The EV DC-One speaker processor is a long-awaited product that is huge in the value quotient (features and performance divided by cost to own). I took delivery of the DC-One and the first thing I noticed was the size of the unit. While it is the expected one-rackspace high, the 14 inches of depth is way beyond the usual amount for these processors. When I inquired about this, the designers uniformly said that customers complained about having to make patches to shallow depth processors when in a rack of full-size power amplifers. Given the go-ahead on depth the designers made good use of the space and concentrated on DSP features and budgets.