Product Review - Cakewalk V-Studio 100 : September 2009
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information £629 including VAT.Edirol Europe +44 (0)202 8747 5949. $699.Cakewalk +1 617 423 9004. December 2009
Other recent issues: | Product Review - Cakewalk V-Studio 100Article Preview :: Computer Recording SystemPublished in SOS September 2009 Reviews : Computer Recording System Control surface, audio interface, digital mixer, solid-state recorder: the V-Studio 100 does it all, but is it a jack of all trades and master of none? Let’s find out...
While the original ‘studio in a box’ V-Studio concept, launched by Roland’s mid-’90s VS880, enjoyed many years of success, the whole digital multitracker format has since fallen out of favour somewhat, as computer studios have become increasingly powerful, convenient and reliable. One senses, though, that Roland have been reluctant to let their cherished brand go to seed, and so have taken their acquisition of software developers Cakewalk as an opportunity to revitalise it for the computer age. The result: the Cakewalk V-Studio 700 flagship, received very favourably by reviewer Martin Walker in the May 2009 issue of SOS, and now, hot on its heels a smaller, nimbler sibling, the V-Studio 100, for those whose aspirations outweigh their bank accounts. As before, it offers audio interfacing, music software and hardware control in a single package, but it also features an onboard solid-state stereo recorder. Confused? Let’s look at it in a bit more detail... Stand-alone Mixing & Recording
Take the computer interfacing and control out of the equation just for the moment and you’re left with an 8:2 digital mixer with stereo recording/playback built in. The first two mixer channels are both mono and fed from mic/line preamps. Both jack and XLR connectors are provided, and phantom-power switching is shared. A high-Z switch on channel one provides a higher impedance at the jack socket for plugging in electric guitars directly. The remaining channels are all stereo, the first fed balanced from TRS jacks, the second unbalanced from RCA phonos, and the third digitally via a coaxial S/PDIF connector. Balanced jacks carry the main stereo mixer outputs, and you can hear the same signal via a front-panel headphone socket. Each channel has a rotary fader, as does the master output, and the first pair of channels have pan pots too. All other control is via the LCD and the four rotary encoders surrounding it. All but the S/PDIF-sourced channel have access to a channel processing chain comprising compressor and three-band parametric EQ in series, and you can send post-fader from any channel to a no-frills preset delay/reverb effect. The channel processing has a fair bit of editing flexibility (although I missed a gain-reduction display), and the encoders make it pretty simple to use, in most cases. ...
Published in SOS September 2009 
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