Has anyone checked out the Zoom HD16CD Yet?

The Boogie Board

Help Support The Boogie Board:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

trickyrick

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 1, 2007
Messages
228
Reaction score
0
Location
Glen Allen, VA
It looks like a pretty cool stand alone unit, loads of storage and a pretty fast cd burner. It also comes with software so you can mix down on your pc and add FX to the mix at mixdown. I have never owned a ZOOM product, I use a BOSS BR8 still and it's getting outdated. It records to a Zip Disk of all things. I just thought that for under $700 for 16 tracks with a lot of bells and whistles it might be cool. Anyone hear or own one? Thanks.
 
It looks pretty junky to me. I am sure, just with any other piece of gear, the user can make or break a product but I just received a used Yamaha AW4416 and I must say I am very impressed with the user interface and of course the motorized faders are a neat visual aid. It has 16 or 24 bit uncompressed recording @ 44.1 or 48khz and is expandable with 2 card slots.

I paid $570 for my AW4416 shipped and it came fully expanded (2 ADAT cards). It's not the most feature laden machine but i am not a recording engineer nor do i plan to make a living off of recording. I owned a Fostex VF08, Roland VS880R, Roland VS1680,1880,1824, and a Tascam 4 track digital recorder and the Yamaha blows them all away for sound quality, features, and price. The only feature I would really want is to have a VGA display but it is not needed.

They average $5-$600 on the bay and i haven't heard of any problems with the units besides the stock cd burner might fail (i still have my original burner and it works fine).

You also have to remember these MSRP'd for $3800 so for the price they sell for now you are getting an absolute steal.


Greg
 
That Zoom looks cool, however from my experience, I tend to stay away from Zoom.

Keep in mind, I have not personally used the HD16CD.

As a background, I started with a 4-track cassette, moved to Cakewalk, upgraded to Cubase, got the original VS880 when it first came out, then went back to Cubase, which I still use. I also keep a Boss BR-900CD at my girlfriend's place.

IMHO, I prefer PC-based recording, mainly because of the user interface and ease of generating MIDI backing tracks. However, in my experience, PC-based recording is prone to complexities of getting everything working right.

Stand-alone systems are easier to use right out of the box and have lots of knobs for quick tweaking. However, editing and MIDI programming is a lot more tedious (although I just noticed you said the Zoom unit allows certain functions on the PC).

That being said, you tend to get what you pay for. I would personally prefer better preamps, better A/D converters, better on-board effects, etc. for better quality recordings over additional bells and whistles. Hard drive size usually isn't that big of a deal because you will fill it up and will need to back it up eventually.

I'd stick to Boss or Roland. Also, I have heard Yamaha makes good stuff, as noted by disassembled.

YMMV depending on your intended use.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top