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I host a weekly radio program on an internet station, the studio is in Southern California. I would use their studio to do my show. I decided to leave California, I was moving to the central USA and the station asked me to consider doing my show remotely. It all happened pretty fast, I was leaving in 2.5 weeks and had to put together the equipment for a home studio to broadcast my show with and on a shoestring budget. I did research and decided on the Mixcast 4. Knowing a bit about audio, I could see through some of the gimicks on the competitors offerings. Digging deeper and learning of all the updates Tascam did (as a result of listening to their customers and users) they added features that only improved the Mixcast4 and made it a much more robust mixer/ interface. I didn’t have time to read everything and learn everything before I had to set up and it was showtime. I arrived to my new home thurs night and had a live broadcast on Sat Night. The layout is very nice and easy to navigate. The touchscreen is clear and responsive with no issues. The touch pads are nice to the touch and very responsive with no lag time. The preamps are nice and quiet. The effects are cool, but I don’t talk with reverb on my voice unless I’m doing some kind of comedy skit. I love the fact that the power cord has to be screwed into place so it’s locked into the unit and the cord cannot be accidentally pulled out. My studio monitors are quiet when nothing is being played back. No noise from the output. This unit sounds and looks good. The faders are solid and not loose and they have a quality professional feel. Headphone amps are very decent. I made it through the first 4.5 hr broadcast just operating off of instincts and a quick look at the guide to set up mics, the SD card and found a usb C to USBA cable to plug into my laptop. I’ve now done 4 shows with it and the second week I started getting compliments that my studio in a different state was sounding better than the radio stations main studio. The following week I received more of the same compliments and the last show I did I received the most amount of compliments yet saying that my studio sounds much better and the quality of the audio sounds like I was in a real radio station studio and I was sounding better than I did at the stations main studio back in CA. The podcast software is an added bonus and easy to use and navigate, easy to import the recordings from the Mixcast memory card, easy to edit, clean up the sound, process the sound and come out with a very professional sounding result. If Tascam keeps improving this, I see this as the next unit to become the top one in this catagory. If you do a side by side, with the Rodecaster Pro2, the differences as very minor and not worth the premium price of the Rodecaster Pro2. The machine is very robust, has usual compressors and noise gates, the 8 pads can be loaded with whatever you want to assign to them. You have 8 layers of 8 buttons for a total of 64 diff audio clips you can assign. I assigned my big drops, my promo drops. Station ID, some bed music, some sound effects and I even assigned the intro music to my show on one. It makes it very easy to use and not have to worry about loading up the promos and IDs to play in the music player. The pre amps have a good amount of gain for low volume gain hungry mics, but I would still use a Fethead or similar on a mic like an SM7B just to have the headroom. If you are on the fence, I would suggest to get the Tascam and use the money saved for a decent mic and boom arm. This was the best $399 investment I made in my studio and my show sounds better than it ever has. So much so I am expanding into other areas such as you tube and launching a few podcasts. Don’t believe me tune into SNJradio.com on Sat nights 8:30PM-1am CST and you can hear with your own ears. This is an affordable solution to sound just as good as the more expensive unit, has most of the features, great preamps and combo jacks in, Bluetooth, mix minus. - talk back button that no other unit has and it’s just as powerful as the other competitors. Tascam has got a winner here with this u it. So much so that the radio station is buying 2 for their main studio to use for production work and for broadcasting. That’s how pleased they are with my Tascam. They said that for the price they can’t believe the quality audio I deliver every week and will be putting one in line very soon. That is a testament to how good this unit is. With zZounds pay as you play it only made sense to me to purchase it and it’s worked out better than I hoped. Thanks Tascam and thanks zZounds

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