The TASCAM DM-24 digital mixer was near the end of its development by the time I joined the project. This was TASCAM's third digital mixer. This product had a lot of things going for it, but it also had MANY weaknesses in the signal flow options, the 5.1 mixing features, it's 88.2 and 96kHz operations and included digital I/O.

I delayed the release of this product for as long as I could because it really wasn't ready for prime time. I was able to get TEAC Japan to implement many improvements to the software features both before and after the release of the product. By the time we got to version 2.0 of the software, the mixer was indeed very powerful, however it did now use a conventional signal flow.

The 5.1 mixing features were quite impressive, although I don't think the product was used often for 5.1 mixing.

TEAC/TASCAM had come up with a very good 8-channel digital I/O called TDIF. (TASCAM DIGITAL INTERFACE) Although it worked very well, very few other products in the industry used it. AES/EBU used the same basic D-25 connectors for 8-channel cables and that protocol was the professional standard for most products. The ADAT optical 8-channel I/O was the industry standard for home and project studio products. The DM-24 was being marketed to the home/project studio customer but it came with 24 channels of TDIF I/O and only 8 channels of ADAT I/O. Option cards were available to expand the ADAT I/O, but they were expensive. The DM-24 should have come with 24 channels of ADAT with option cards for TDIF instead. They would have sold ten times the amount of mixers .

The one feature that could not be criticized about the DM-24 was the automation.  My good friend Jim Bailey wrote the spec for the automation and it was perfect. It was also implemented properly in the software.

Before I left TASCAM I had a new option card put in to production. The IF-FW/DM. This was a Firewire audio interface card that allowed the user to send tracks to and from the DAW. When it was finally released I found that the product had not been specified properly. It was supposed to have been able to mix 32 tracks sent from the DAW and send the stereo mix back to the DAW. They did not implement this.