Our friend MoRpH (whose work you’ve seen previously posted to archive.org and on the intro to our VMS video) was lucky enough to get his hands on an Edirol V8 - sequel to the venerable V4 - and followed it up by being awesome enough to send us this review.

A few years back Roland rocked the VJ world by giving us the first ever VJ specific video mixer, the V4. Over time, other areas such as small AV companies and churches have adopted the wonderfully small and low cost (but full featured) unit as a workhorse in many environments. But taking one look at the unit you can see it was designed for VJs. Now with the release of the V8, Roland is back to up the ante again with a feature set that builds on the success of the V4, without bogging the unit down with hidden features or a large price tag. I was lucky enough to get some hands on time with the first one to touch down in Australia recently, much to my delight.

The most striking things that first hit you about the new V8 have to be the inclusion of 8 inputs (a god send on large multi source rigs) and the change to faders, instead of pots/knobs from the old V4. Clearly on this front Roland have been listening to their users, with the inputs now being BNC plugs on the rear of the unit with individual monitor outs and the faders being excellent quality. You can see that this is an evolution of the V4 design, which often caused problems with the top mounted RCA inputs and the Pots on the FX and White/Black fade needing to be replaced. A very well placed tweak to the White/Black output fade system means that - instead of having to keep the knob centered - we now get 100% signal on the fader all the way up and 100% white or black, selectable on a separate switch, with the fader all the way down.

Also on the fading front, we have individual bus fades, so at the press of a button your FX fader becomes a video level for the channel, which combined with the new Mix modes I’ll cover later makes this a perfect scratch video tool.

Live visual instruments often lack that … certain something. Other than occasional oddities like the Livid Viditar, generally visual performance instruments just don’t have the panache of musical instruments. The solution: pack a bunch of hardware into the body of a white-lacquered grand piano, of course! (What, that seemed like a logical leap?)

As seen on our sister site Create Digital Motion:
BabyGrandMaster: DJ/VJ Studio Packed into a Piano

The innards look like someone held a sweepstakes for VJ and DJ gear and then consulted Prince for industrial design tips. (And that’s even before you add the optional pink neon underlighting and fog effects. Seriously.) For visualists:

1. Dual Pioneer DVJ-X1 DVD Players
2. Edirol V-4 Video Mixer
3. [Triple] Marshal LCD Monitors

I suppose this is one answer to Jaymis’ question of what he should use for a gig case. (Come on, someone’s discarded Young Chang may be sitting at the local scrapyard. Pain that sucker, drop in your gear, good to go. Uh, sorta.)

I’ve had a bit more time now with my (still shiny, still new) Numark AVM02 - or “Avmo” as it’s been dubbed by my bandmates - and have some more thoughts to offer, if you will hear them. If you haven’t heard the original thoughts or seen the unboxing photos you may like to check out my “First Impressions” review.

Obviously the biggest question I’m going to get is “how does it compare to the Edirol V4″, so I’ll come out straight away and disappoint those who are looking for that comparison: This article will focus mostly on the AVM02’s own strengths and weaknesses, and while some comparisons to the V4 and other video mixers may be drawn, you’ll have to make your own conclusions at this stage. I will be doing a full head to head features-and-quality shootout vodcast in the coming weeks, so I’ll save the serious V4 comparisons until then.

Unit Specs

The AVM02 combines a basic DJ mixer with what I guess could be described as a “DJ Style” video mixer, and is able to combine 4 Video channels and 4 Stereo Audio channels, mixing with independant (but linkable) Video and Audio crossfaders.

I have just received and unwrapped my shiny new Numark AVM02 mixer. Unfortunately way too late for the 3 gigs I had over the weekend, so it will be a week or so until I have a hands-on, performance review. In the meantime though, I have plenty of first impressions.

It’s shiny. It’s big (19″ rack standard). Build quality is very solid - no surprises there - and all faders, knobs and buttons feel like they’re attached to a professional mixer. The crossfaders are a little slow, needing to be pushed all the way across rather than travelling there with a flick, and the lack of ”transform” buttons rules out some fun mixing tricks which can be performed with the V4, but perhaps this will encourage me to develop better crossfader technique.

It has many inputs and outputs. Ignoring the audio stuff for now (which is so passe darlings) we have 4 S-Video and 4 Composite in (not switchable, not sure how it selects between them). 2 S-Video and 2 Composite out, and 4 composite monitor outs.

Put it next to the V4 and one thing is instantly apparent: You’re getting a lot of mixer for your money.