This happened to me all the time with the M12’s power switch. If you look on the Tascam forums, it’s clearly a very common problem.
The solution that worked for me is to get a good solid “on” flick of the power switch, and then never touch that switch ever again—I now use a Furman power strip as the Main Power controller.
If you’re willing to get your hands (and warranty) dirty, some folks in the link above have replaced that switch or even bypassed it. There are a few YT videos on it if you look.
Good luck! I love my M12 but a bum power switch is one hell of a defect to be as common as this.
Thanks for the info! I really wish I had read that earlier because I gave up on the M12.
I sent it for warranty repair and the shop took so long with it and wouldn’t communicate at all I just asked for refund as they didn’t have any other in stock (in EU they have 30 days to repair).
I miss it really. Great piece and I would’ve kept it if this power problem didn’t give me such bad vibes. I still have to find a replacement mixer (I’m back to my old ultralite MK3 atm)
Now that I don’t have it I think theoretically the MTR is really great but when I had it I didn’t use it that much - I ended up recording one master take all the time and never got used to the luxury of redoing individual track takes.
Interesting, I didn’t see that forum thread before thanks for linking. I was kind of made to feel like I was making up the issue by my retailer originally when I sent my first one off to repair, and then kind of by Tascam when it apparently went to them and they just returned it with no trouble found… but clearly it’s a problem others have come across. And that’s really poor QC on Tascams part.
At the moment despite the issue which still occurs on most power ups, it is serving me pretty well and makes things quite straight forward when actually making music. If it does fail on me I guess I’ll look into DIY repair and if no success move on to other products and steer well clear of this line of mixers.
I got one of these from a buddy today and I’m running to something I didn’t expect.
My usecase: I plan to use this an interface for my macbook but also occasionally MTR with all my gear hooked up sans computer.
After some cursory research I knew I’d have to give up a stereo channel for the computers output to come back through. I ended up using Loopback to move the default output from tracks 1/2 to 9/10 to have the single fader for volume. This works well. Tracks 11/12 are not available through this or any other method that I know of, unfortunately.
What I was surprised by is that my master output goes through the compressor and EQ still. I did some testing and there is still a fairly strong coloration even when these are set to their minimum and middle detent points.
Is there something I’m missing? AFAIK you can’t route computer audio straight to the main outs or anywhere else that would bypass the track strip.
