i'm Adrian product specialist for RME Audio and today we will bring new life into
this old lovely panasonic digital mixer with the Digiface USB. Introduced back
in the 90s the panasonic WR DA7 is a lovely old 32 channel digital mixer that
i still use to this day, because of its vintage tone and great workflow. The only
downside of the DA7 is the lack of modern digital connectivity like USB or
thunderbolt. Back in the day, ADAT was the widely accepted standard for digital
recording gear, which is why most of the professional audio gear of that era, like
the DA7 implemented ADAT - that's where the Digiface USB comes into play.
The Digiface USB is a 66 channel USB audio interface comprised of 32 ADAT
input and output channels plus a stereo headphone out. Hence the Digiface USB is
perfect to implement all digital gear into a modern computer based setup.
This DA7 is equipped with two ADAT carts giving us access to 16 analog preamp
channels, that we can record simultaneously, which should be enough in
most cases to record a whole drum set or a life band and on top of that we can
playback sixteen channels from our DAW and mix in the console or send them to
other outboard gear for further processing and as if that was not enough
we gained the flexibility and workflow of TotalMix FX.
The setup is very straightforward, we are simply connecting the output channels of
the Panasonic with the input channels of the Digiface and vice versa.
Then we check the routing of the DA7 and make sure that the 16 analog input
channels of the DA7 are routed to the a ADAT slots.
The last thing that we have to do, is to select the Digiface as an audio device in our
DAW of choice
As you can see the mixer is getting audio signals from my DAW session so
everything works as planned. we hope this video was helpful.