Tascam Sonicview 24

Tascam shake up the digital console market with a powerful, all‑new design.

Most people who have been involved with audio will have owned or at least used something with a Tascam badge at some point. The company are well known for producing high‑quality, practical products, and have been chiefly associated with the recording industry at various levels. I myself have owned (and still own) various Tascam portable recorders and replay machines, and they have given great service over the years. Now Tascam have turned their considerable expertise to the production of a new digital mixer, the Sonicview. There are two basic versions available, in a choice of two sizes, known simply as the Sonicview 16 and Sonicview 24. In the US, they are marketed with the suffix ‘XP’ and include an IF‑MTR32 32‑track recorder card pre‑installed, whereas in Europe the recorder card is sold separately.

A new digital mixer from an established industry name is always going to stir up interest, and this one is particularly striking in that the Sonicview is not derived from an existing range. Tascam haven’t been a ‘name’ in the world of portable digital mixers recently, although there are still many DM‑series mixers still doing the business in studios all over the place. The Sonicview is, therefore, a brand‑new product, and one with a considerable amount of research and development behind it. And development is ongoing too: just before NAB 2024, v1.6.0 firmware was released, which adds some specific functionality for broadcast, such as audio‑follows‑video triggered by an event from a video switcher/mixer.

The Sonicview has, as far as I can see, been designed to appeal to three main markets: broadcast, recording and, of course, live sound in all its many forms. I was loaned the Sonicview 24 for this review, with the IF‑MTR32 32‑track recorder card option installed.

Beating Heart

The mix engine of the Tascam Sonicview employs 54‑bit floating‑point maths and processes audio at 96kHz, delivered through 32‑bit A‑D converters. It runs on an FPGA (field‑programmable gate array) which performs all the signal processing necessary to support the mix operations provided to the user. Mix engine latency is a speedy 0.51ms from mic input to line output, which shouldn’t cause any issues with live monitoring. Just how powerful and fast this processing is becomes apparent when you start reading the reference manual and begin to discover how much functionality and configurability has been incorporated into this mixer — there’s usually more than one way to achieve almost anything you could wish to do, and bear in mind that it’s a fresh, young product with a long road of user input and firmware enhancements ahead of it!

The Sonicview 16 and Sonicview 24 both have exactly the same internal processing capabilities (channel count, bus count, effects, expansion slots and so on) and the only differences are apparent on the top and rear panels: the Sonicview 16 has 16 channel faders (plus one master), 16 mic/line inputs, 16 rotary encoders and two seven‑inch touchscreens, whereas the Sonicview 24 has, as you might guess, 24+1 faders, rotaries and mic/line inputs, and three touchscreens. Above each bank of eight faders is an LCD screen that can act as a scribble strip or show input levels; there’s a dedicated output meter on the top right of the desk. In addition to the per‑channel controls (mute, solo and select buttons, and rotary encoder), there are 18 assignable user keys, seven custom fader layers, and eight DCAs. A headphone output at the front is usefully mirrored on both quarter‑inch and mini‑jack sockets.

Ins & Outs

The front end of this mixer is equipped with what Tascam call their HDIA preamps. This stands for High Definition Instrumentation Architecture, and the design delivers excellent noise, distortion and frequency‑response figures, with the ability to maintain performance throughout the gain range. There is 54dB of programmable analogue gain available, with further digital gain adjustment and a ‑20dB pad. Together with the 32‑bit converters, this delivers a lot of headroom, with the inputs able to handle up to +32dBu line levels before clipping. The 16 output XLRs (and the monitor outs) employ 24‑bit/96kHz converters.

In total there are 44 input channels to the mix — 40 mono and two stereo. All mono inputs can be stereo linked in pairs, and have input gain, digital trim, polarity reverse, ‑20dB pad, a gate/expander/de‑esser, EQ (four‑band parametric plus HPF), and keyable compressor/ducker facilities. The two stereo input channels are equipped with a four‑band parametric EQ.

The 40 mono channels also have a delay setting, which can be applied either at the input of the channel strip or pre‑fader; a direct out, which can be at the input of the channel strip, post HPF or post‑fader; and an insert send/return point, which can be pre‑EQ or pre‑fader and can be assigned to any of the I/O (analogue, Dante, USB or expansion slots). This is configured from the input module Overview tab, where you can also find the delay setting.

On the output side, there are 22 mix buses in addition to the main mix. Buses can be linked together to form stereo outputs, and can be configured as...